AARP Hearing Center
Rating: R
Run time: 1 hour 53 minutes
Stars: Alfre Woodard, Wendell Pierce, Aldis Hodge, Richard Schiff
Director: Chinonye Chukwu
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When we first meet Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard, 67), a maximum-security prison warden, she seems like a person who's got everything under strict control.
Her prison looks a bit like the world of George Lucas’ sci-fi film THX 1138: futuristic, austere, hyperrational, totalitarian. But in the preternaturally expressive eyes of Woodard — among the greatest actors alive — we sense the executions are getting to her, and control is an illusion that she, and the whole system, struggles in vain to maintain.
This is the 12th execution she's supervised, a macabre kind of theater piece staged for an audience of relatives observing from behind a big window.
Something goes wrong with the lethal injection. Instantly, it's a bloody mess — Grand Guignol theater. Warden Williams yanks the curtain to hide the mess, but you can't unsee the ugliness. Afterward, you see it in her haunted eyes. She drinks too much. She sleeps on the couch, has nightmares in which she's on the death gurney and the dead prisoner looms over her.
She keeps her doting schoolteacher husband (Treme's brilliant Wendell Pierce, 56) at arm's length. “I need a pulse,” he protests. But she's miles away, vanishing inside herself, a prisoner condemned to solitary confinement. “I am alone, and nobody can fix it,” she confesses to a friend.
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