The Rev. Richard Lopez tells of a pair of squirrels he almost ran over one day, when they stopped in front of his golf cart. He was able to save their lives, though, stepping on the brakes just in time.
But as a minister to the condemned in the state of Texas, he’s powerless to spare the inmates who receive lethal injections as he stands by. All life is precious to Lopez, and the lives on those gurneys, the ones he can’t pull back from death, hit him hard as he recalls those squirrels. As he draws this comparison at the start of Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss, he begins to weep.
It’s a typically Herzogian moment: a memorable character unexpectedly and idiosyncratically expressing something simple and profound. But while Into the Abyss is instantly recognizable as a Herzog documentary, it’s anything but typical.
Ostensibly a film about the death penalty, it concentrates on two young men convicted of a 2001 triple murder, committed in the course of a car theft. One, Michael Perry, has been sentenced to death; the other, Jason Burkett, received life in prison.
Herzog interviews both men, but isn’t really interested in their defenses, in their claims of injustice — each contends the other committed the murders without his involvement — or in rational,statistical or correctional-science analyses of capital punishment. Herzog has never been an overtly political filmmaker, and what interests him here are the emotional and spiritual tolls that crimes of life and death take beyond the murders themselves — the dark cloud of pain, anger, depression, resentment and remorse that spreads over the friends and family of everyone involved, eventually circling back on the criminal and triggering cycles of pain.