LETHAL WEAPON

The Year’s Most Talked-About Movie Star Stuns in New Role

Tim Blake Nelson’s “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” is striking the zeitgeist like a lightning bolt.

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In many ways, Tim Blake Nelson could never have known that his new film, The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, would be so timely. In others, he was sure that was inevitable.

Nelson is one of Hollywood’s most respected actors, especially for his work in Coen brothers classics like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and films like Syriana and Minority Report. (Or, for a certain generation, his appearance in Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed might ring a bell.) He’s also made a mark as a writer-director with his movies O and The Grey Zone.

He wears all three hats for Wilson Shedd, playing a small role in the project that he wrote and directed. When we spoke at the Virginia Film Festival, where the film screened and Nelson received the Virtuoso Award, it was hard not to marvel at the timing.

Wilson Shedd was screening at a moment when it was firmly in step with the zeitgeist, almost zapping into it like a lightning strike.

It stars the actress who is currently the most talked-about person in the industry, Amanda Seyfried, playing the lead here after stunning audiences with her appearance in Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything.

“What I like to say about her is that, and this is true in the Nathan Fielder movie within a few minutes, she’s so open and so present and unedited and almost insouciant about how she’s perceived, what she is,” he said. “She’s so un-movie star in that regard.”

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The praise, believe it or not, only built from there.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a more seamless, open, and direct relationship with an actor in my years of directing and performing opposite other actors,” he continued. “She’s utterly present and utterly open. She brings wit and intelligence to everything she does. She’s vulnerable and captivating, but also capable of total transformation into another being. That’s what makes her more an actress than movie star, but of course, she’s both.”

That his leading lady, whom he’s so impressed by, would be so buzzy right now is pure coincidence. The other reason Wilson Shedd is so topical, and primed to equally inform and inflame an extremely complicated, provocative discourse, is something Nelson, unfortunately, foresaw.

The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd centers around Wilson (Scoot McNairy), an inmate on death row. He is immediately enamored by Karen (Seyfried), who teaches a creative writing class at the prison.

As he pours his heart out in his writing assignments, revealing a humanity that seems at odds with his impending execution, Karen, who is listless and depressed with her abusive, alcoholic husband, is moved by the attention he’s paying her. They become the closest thing they can to lovers, under the circumstances: romantic pen pals through his writing homework.

Nelson, however, shrewdly cuts back and forth through time. Just as you become endeared to Wilson and pity his fate, brutal, graphic flashbacks depict the monstrous acts he committed that earned him the death sentence he’s awaiting.

As your conscience and moral compass contort into knots, attempting to understand the warring pangs of compassion and disgust you feel for Wilson, his execution date arrives.

(Warning: A light spoiler ahead, but a crucial element of the film.)

Nelson depicts the procedure with an unflinching, and, as such, unsettling cinematic candor: allowing it to unfold in real time, just as it would in real life, climaxing with an excruciating, horrific botched injection, training the camera on McNairy as he writhes through the torture and pain.

Nelson and I were speaking less than a month after the botched execution of Christa Pike, the Tennessee convict who became the first known person in the U.S. to survive an execution attempt. The uproar over something so seemingly inhumane met the chorus reminding people of the violent murder Pike committed and the ever-raging debate over whether capital punishment is just. As the scene unfolds in Wilson Shedd, it’s impossible to silence the din of that conversation.

Nelson told me that he studied the 2014 botched execution of Clayton Lockett, whose lethal injection was stopped after he convulsed and even spoke during the procedure, even attempting to break free from the restraints and get off the table, before eventually dying of a heart attack. Wilson’s execution in the film meticulously recreates what happened to Lockett.

Lockett “was absolutely guilty and did awful things to a young girl,” Nelson said. But the goal was to “still show the anodyne brutality of execution in America.” The reason for being so detailed and true to Lockett’s experience in his film is “because we still do it the same way, so it was going to happen again,” he said. “And if we keep doing it, it’ll continue to happen again.”

The news about Christa Pike broke as The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd was making the fall film festival circuit. It was exactly what Nelson predicted and why he was moved to make this film, turned into a nightmarish reality.

“I was not surprised by what happened in Tennessee,” he said, “and I did not feel vindicated.”

Nelson directed the 2001 modern adaptation of Othello, O, starring Julia Stiles and Josh Hartnett. During filming, the massacre at Columbine occurred, and the film’s release was delayed due to its depiction of high school violence.

“It’s sort of the same thing,” Nelson said. “We were making a movie then about this epidemic of high school violence. Since many of the root causes weren’t being addressed, it was going to happen again. And it did.”

Nelson spent 12 years writing, developing, and bringing Wilson Shedd to the screen. When I asked what captivated him about these topics and sparked his desire to spend a decade delving into them, he said he’s always seen imprisonment as a metaphor for how we live as humans.

“We’re born and then we’re going to die, and everyone has parameters and rules by which they need to live to be functioning members of a society,” he said. “No, I don’t wake up every day and feel imprisoned, but I think that there’s something to the power of incarceration that speaks to the limits of life at their most extreme.”

Like many of us, one of Nelson’s biggest fears is being incarcerated and being removed from the freedom of daily life, “even though that freedom is kind of a lie.”

More specifically to the film’s themes surrounding capital punishment, he said he was interested in “the extremes of retribution, because we use retribution to correct what’s inimical to a functioning society, and I’m intrigued by where that line is when it becomes hypocritical.”

I asked Nelson where The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd might sit in a genre of films centered on death row inmates and capital punishment like The Green Mile, Dead Man Walking, Just Mercy, or Clemency. What effect might these movies have on audiences and how they think about capital punishment after getting to know these characters through these films?

“The combination of sound, image, performance, and music, particularly in narrative features, is more powerful than any art form that man has come up with,” he said. “So just by doing that, if you’re going to make a pro-death penalty movie, you can harness the power for the screen. Or if you’re going to make an anti-death penalty movie, you can harness that power in a way that no other form has done. Just by virtue of making a movie, It’s going to be persuasive.”

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Kevin FallonEditor-at-Large, Obsessed

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