At one point in the film “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” a prison official played by Tim Blake Nelson sighs and says, “I will never understand people.” But Nelson is also the writer and director of “Wilson Shedd,” a dark and probing drama that you might consider an attempt to understand people, or at least the stories they tell.
A bold indie production that draws from the real-life case that also inspired the 2018 miniseries “Escape at Dannemora,” the film from veteran character actor, playwright and novelist Nelson scrambles chronology, pulls Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor and even Emily Dickinson into a prison setting, invites the audience to sympathize with its central characters and then forces viewers to come to terms with the people to whom they’re giving that sympathy. Watching it can be a troubling experience, and by the end a grueling one; it is also richly rewarding drama that doesn’t let anybody off the hook, characters or viewers.
And if that sounds a little forbidding, it is also a showcase for two gripping performances, one from Scoot McNairy as a convict and one from Amanda Seyfried as a teacher, trapped in an abusive marriage, who takes a job teaching creative writing to inmates.
The linear version of the story is that Seyfried’s character, Karen, finds something honest and shattering in the stories Wilson Shedd (McNairy) writes in her class, and he likes her because she doesn’t talk down to the convicts like all the other teachers do. The bond that begins in the pages of a notebook grows until she’s smuggling items into the prison to help him escape.
The movie begins to tell that linear version of the story, with Seyfried’s character led into the prison to the accompaniment of blaring buzzers, heavy slamming doors and fists pounding on thick walls, only to announce herself by saying, “Hi, I’m Karen” in the meekest, quietest voice imaginable.
But before her story gets too far, the film jumps to two other narratives and trusts the audience to figure out the chronology. In one, three escaped prisoners, including Shedd, run through the woods and break into an abandoned cabin; in another, a young Black family – father, mother and two grade-school-age children – go on a family trip. There’s something bucolic about those family scenes, but a sense of foreboding, even doom hangs over them.
Later, other stories come in: One that Shedd writes in class about a boy who repeatedly shoots a squirrel with his BB gun because the animal refuses to die, and another in which prison officials go through the rituals to prepare for Shedd’s execution.
The jumps in time aren’t really confusing, but they’re confrontational in what they show: They force the audience to acknowledge who these people are, and by doing that to take the measure of the empathy they may be feeling.
And make no mistake, Seyfried and McNairy can never be dismissed as monsters. Karen has long since checked out of her marriage, heading for the back yard as soon as she gets home to avoid spending time within the walls that also contain her brutish husband. Her life is shot through with desperation, enough that a convict with a touch of grace in his prose can feel like an agent of redemption.
For Shedd, who was long ago thrown on society’s scrap heap, there’s a yearning to have somebody acknowledge that he’s worth a damn. Both Seyfried and McNairy make us feel for these people, but we know what’s happened in the past and we know what’s going to happen in the future, which makes the talk about forgiveness seem thorny indeed.
Then again, all kinds of people – and institutions – may need forgiveness for things that happen in “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd.” The homestretch finds Shedd taking a walk through prison corridors, a journey that begins to the sounds of rumbling and banging and ends with a plaintive human lament on acoustic guitar. The state’s version of justice is cold, relentless and horrifying; if those things happen to somebody who’s done awful things, does that mean they’re justified?
In asking a lot of tough questions and pushing the audience into areas of discomfort, “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” is one of the most powerful films at this year’s TIFF, where it’s in search of a daring distributor. With the help of two of the year’s most wrenching lead performances, Tim Blake Nelson has taken what could have been a provocative small movie and turned it into one that is big, bold and haunting.
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