Writer/Director Tim Blake Nelson brings his film “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” to the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival, after its premiere in Toronto. The film promises to set off an overdue debate on the death penalty as state-sanctioned punishment. Versatile actor Scoot McNairy gives the performance of his career as Wilson Shedd and Amanda Seyfried expertly plays the creative writing instructor who is hired to work at Oklahoma’s largest maximum security prison and becomes involved in a relationship with the convicted murderer. Karen’s (Seyfried’s) life is bleak, leading to this summation, “We’ve done what we done and we have what we have.” Is Wilson Shedd a way out?
THE LOVE STORY
Writer/Director/Actor Tim Blake Nelson.
An accomplished actor and a classics scholar who has written five plays, Nelson spent a year and a half to two years writing the screenplay, but the project itself has been an obsession of his for a dozen years. It was only recently that funding for the indie film could be secured. In an interview, Nelson gave credit to Seyfried for helping facilitate the backing for this thought-provoking film that refuses to paint the criminal Wilson Shedd as one-dimensional.
There have been many films about the execution of prisoners on Death Row. “Clemency,” starring Alfre Woodard as the warden of a prison, who is wrestling with the concept of crime and appropriate punishment, played at the Chicago Film Festival in 2019 and was a powerful examination of some of the same issues as this film. But the story on the surface is about a couple—prisoner and prison worker— who fall in love through writing.
We learn that creative writing teacher Karen (Seyfried) needs money to support her elderly father in a nursing home, so she takes the job teaching creative writing to prisoners at the local prison. Her friend Gladys (an under-utilized Waughan) helps her get the job.
Some of the class members, like Vaughn (Craig Dane) and James (Tobias Segal) are probably just there to ogle the pretty blonde. But Wilson Shedd seems to have genuine feelings for his instructor. Or does he? Yes, he writes (via his journal) “Love will break us through,” but is he sincere or simply seeing an opportunity for escape? Wilson’s protestations of true love might collapse if put to the test.
Circumstances intervene to prevent the pair from ever truly being physically “together.” The poems of Emily Dickinson and the short stories of Flannery O’Connor are infused into the script. It appears that Karen—who is trapped in a loveless marriage with physically abusive husband Kenneth (Grant Harvey)—engages in the ill-fated relationship with the convict through appreciating the writing he does in her class. His writing to her is all that keeps her going, emotionally. She ultimately writes “Save me” to the prisoner. Wilson Shedd says, “I live in hell, which is where I should be.” The film does not play the usual “he’s innocent” card, however, but considers the factors that have led to his life of Hell on Earth.
THE DEBATE OVER FORGIVENESS
A Black family, the Lawsons, is depicted as the nearly perfect family, with vocally gifted children. Eric Blount plays George Lawson, the young boy, and his sister, Stacey Lawson, is portrayed by Xuri Selah. The parents (William Jackson Harper and Devyn Tyler) are ministers.
To me, the use of the Black family, (who fall into the hands of the escaped trio of prisoners because of a pet cat escaping from their van in the woods and running directly to Wilson Shedd), was a somewhat contrived round-about way of making sure that Wilson is not viewed as a supremely romantic hero. One review called the Black family’s presence in the plot “exploitative, but essential.” Their involvement seemed less natural to the film’s structure. It is worth mentioning that it is Wilson’s fellow escapee who is told to “take the kids for a walk” and mis-interprets the message. Wilson confronts the prisoner, asking him whether he is more evil or more stupid? A move to shift blame from the central character and the mastermind of the escape?
Wilson Shedd s guilty, In the course of the film, he murders at least eight people. The Black family must fall into Wilson’s hands in order to balance the sympathy for him that we feel after we see young Wilson as a squirrel hunter and learn of Wilson’s hard-luck life growing up in a suburb outside Tulsa ( Writer/Director Nelson’s hometown). Benjamin Brown portrays the young Wilson Shedd, seen shooting a poor squirrel over and over and over, while the animal, rather than fleeing, seems to adopt the attitude that he must suffer and endure whatever cruelty is meted out. The squirrel must go down fighting, and it does. The script says, “Part of the boy died, too, for the rest of his life.” It was a powerful metaphor. But, in this country at this time, will the presence of the scene be condemned as too “woke” and used to provide an excuse for inexcusable criminal behavior?
TIME: FLASHING FORWARD & BACKWARD
After 100 minutes dealing with the theme of Karen and Wilson falling in love via writing in the creative writing class journals, the physical abuse of Karen by her husband, forgiveness as a concept, and a true prison escape story that reminded of Patricia Arquette’s lead role in Showtime’s 2018 television miniseries (directed by Ben Stiller and co-starring Benicio del Toro and Paul Dano) “Escape at Dannemora,” we get to the real soul of the film: the death penalty and its use as a punishment.
After his appearance in “The Grey Zone” (2001) about the Holocaust, Tim Blake Nelson, Jewish by birth, said the film’s examination of how the Holocaust could have happened was “exactly the type of story to which we should gravitate in a responsible and sensitive way.” So is this film. “The Grey Zone” pointed out, as the New York Times put it, that while Hitler was evil, the genocide of a country working to establish efficient concentration camps designed to indiscriminately kill human beings required “the casual complicity of millions of others.” Much evil does. That thought is worth mentioning in a debate over the humanity of capital punishment.
Throughout the two hour and one minute movie there were flash forwards and looks back at Wilson Shedd’s childhood, a tough life that molded the child into the man. Some found this technique intrusive. I marveled that Nelson could pull it off as well as he did. It’s not easy to do sequencing of time well in a play, a novel or a screenplay. I did not see the jumping ahead and then looking back as a way to de-sensitize the audience or influence our judgment of the central character. I saw a talented filmmaker and Julliard graduate who has starred in and written entire plays and novels displaying mastery of his craft.
If I had a negative remark to make about the execution of the film it would be that the musical background was not melodic but very monotonous and clunky. At times it sounded like a novice piano player simply pounding on the keys. That detracted from the film, rather than enhancing it. The expert cinematography of Benoit Soler, however, more than offset the sound design.
THE EXECUTION SCENE
After relating a familiar story about a woman falling for a prisoner and helping him to escape, the authorities apprehend Wilson Shedd and the audience is subjected to one of the most grueling execution scenes in recent memory. I still remember Susan Hayward’s Oscar-winning gas chamber execution in the 1958 film “I Want to Live.” It burned its way into my then-young brain. I have never forgotten it.
We could turn to the more recent (1999) electrocution scene in “The Green Mile” and rewatch that five minutes of pure torture, but I’d rather not. Also in the “No seconds for me, please” category of execution-scenes-I-have- seen-but-don’t-want-to-see-again would be “Dead Man Walking” (1995, Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn), “The Life of David Gale” (2003, Kevin Spacey) or Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning turn (2003’s “Monster.”) I do not want to see the last 40 minutes of this film again, but it is an important film because of the truth it treats so sensitively. I applaud Tim Blake Nelson for his decades-long quest to bring the story to the public forum for debate.
I did want to know if this execution scene was based on a real execution (it was) and whether it was accurately portrayed. The issues it raises are timely and important and deserve a public debate and full disclosure of issues that the authorities have sought to obscure following each botched execution attempt in more than one state.
The answer to whether this film is based on a real execution is yes.
The Oklahoma execution of Clayton Lockett on April 29, 2014, was thoroughly botched and was halted 43 minutes into the proceedings at McAlester Prison. Like the recent botched execution of Krista Pike in Nashville on September 30, 2026, this film brings to the forefront questions about the death penalty. If you approve of the death penalty for heinous crimes, it at least raises the issue of how well such executions are being carried out nationwide.
Recently the Trump administration announced plans to attempt to live stream an execution on December 3rd, by firing squad. Is this really a good idea? What IS the most humane way to kill an animal, in this case, a human being? Whether you think capital punishment is good or bad, a closer look at how effectively it is being carried out is warranted. Is capital punishment humane? Are we a nation of “barbarians at the gate,” as we were portrayed worldwide for many decades? Are we returning to that self-portrait voluntarily, when we embrace it with open arms complete with testosterone tests for our military and macho posturing? Note: no one, including Tim Blake Nelson, is suggesting that crime should not be punished and the debate over capital punishment has raged for generations.
As one death penalty opponent put it, “State-sanctioned death rarely provides the ‘closure’ it promotes.” I was in Nashville at the time of the failed execution there on September 30th. The words of Clayton Pike’s attorney, Dean Sanderford apply to the Nashville situation. After the execution of Clayton Lockett was called off 43 minutes in, at 6:40 p.m. on Tuesday, April 29th, his attorney said, “My God. They’re going to try to save this poor guy so they can kill him later.” That very statement could be made about Krista Pike. She is the only person to have survived two doses of pentobarbital during a botched execution. As of now, her future in prison is unclear, although the executions scheduled in Tennessee for the rest of the year have been canceled, resignations have occurred, and an investigation panel Is being appointed. Meanwhile, many details of “botched” executions are concealed from the public; they seem to continue to happen with increasing frequency. Shouldn’t we at least find out why?
“We have a fundamental standard in this country that even when the death penalty is justified, it must be carried out humanely,” said Jay Carney, President Obama’s press secretary, in regards to the execution of Clayton Lockett. “And I think everyone would recognize that this case fell short of that standard.” The 8th amendment to the Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.” The recent spate of botched executions brings home those concerns and the final scene in this film makes the problems impossible to ignore . In Tennessee, the mother of the victim was extremely upset that she had raised the funds to travel from Florida to Tennessee via a Go-Fund-Me campaign and she was not being served her pound of flesh. Her adamant demands for justice for her daughter (the victim of Krista Pike’s jealousy when Pike was 18) remain. She sounds like she will be suing the state for financial restitution, predicated on her unrequited desire for revenge.
It is a “China Syndrome” coincidence that Tim Blake Nelson’s film is seeking distribution in the immediate wake of Krista Pike’s failed execution, but it may help bring these facts regarding lethal injection deaths in general out into the open, especially since both Oklahoma and Tennessee have been far from transparent about what went wrong. For example,
- A spate of executions that have gone awry since states began experimenting with different drug combinations after being unable to obtain more standard lethal injection drugs.
- On Jan. 9, Michael Lee Wilson, who was convicted of murdering a convenience store clerk, declared he “felt his whole body burning” after Oklahoma administered a combination of pentobarbital, vecuronium bromide to stop respiration and potassium chloride to stop the heart.
- A week later, Dennis McGuire, who was sentenced to die for raping and killing a 22-year-old pregnant woman, thrashed and snorted before finally succumbing after about 25 minutes following Ohio’s use of a new lethal drug mix. McGuire’s family is now suing Hospira, a pharmaceutical company, for providing the state with execution drugs.
- Numerous states have passed laws as a way to protect drug suppliers from boycotts and other political backlash. As commercial pharmaceutical companies increasingly refuse to allow their products to be used in executions, states have turned to compounding pharmacies for their supply. These pharmacies, which mix drugs to order, are not regulated by the federal government.
Scoot McNairy as Wilson Shedd.
One line from the script, spoken by the warden who has witnessed 112 executions during her tenure: “It isn’t something you can choose to forget. It’s going to be with you always.” My father, then a deputy sheriff in Buchanan County, Iowa, was sent to Des Moines to witness a double hanging. I remember him recounting the horror of the moment, which made him physically ill. We see the “first-timer” in the room struggling. The indignity and horror of the execution protocol process in “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” will stay with me a long time. It is an important film and one that imparts valuable information to citizens, but if you are attending the showing on Saturday, October 17th in Chicago, be warned that the accurate portrayal of an execution is not for the faint of heart.
As one Toronto critic wrote, “The film is poised to become a touchstone in the ongoing American debate over the death penalty. In a political climate where capital punishment remains a polarizing issue, Nelson’s unflinching focus on the humanity of the guilty may prove to be the most provocative cinematic statement of the year.”
