Exploring Anguish and Absurdity of Killings, Wanton or Sanctioned - film: Into the Abyss

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In Werner Herzog’s new documentary, “Into the Abyss,” sorrow spreads like an oil slick on water. The movie finds, in a relatively banal, thoroughly senseless American story of crime and punishment, enough darkness to make you wonder about the title. Is death, which unites murderers with their victims and executioners, and ultimately with everyone else, the abyss that Mr. Herzog wants us to contemplate? Or is he directing our attention toward a black hole that sits in the middle of life?

The paradox of this film is that it is both unremittingly bleak and rigorously humane. Mr. Herzog, interviewing killers, survivors, witnesses and officials in law enforcement and corrections, is polite even when asking uncomfortable questions, and the seriousness of his intentions allows humor and absurdity to bubble up amid all the pain. He never appears on camera, but his unmistakable voice — dry, precise, carrying the accent of his native Bavaria — ties together this tapestry of conflicting testimony, inchoate emotion and unredeemed ugliness.

In its alternation of talking-head interviews and archival video clips, “Into the Abyss” superficially resembles the kind of titillating, moralizing true-crime shockumentary that is a staple of off-hours cable television. But the grim ordinariness of the narrative makes its Dostoyevskian dimensions all the more arresting.

In October 2001, in Conroe, Tex., Sandra Stotler, her son Adam and his friend Jeremy Richardson were murdered, apparently because the killers wanted the red Camaro in Ms. Stotler’s garage. About a week later, after a shootout in a shopping center parking lot, two young men were arrested in the case. One, Jason Burkett, received a life sentence. The other, Michael Perry, was sentenced to death.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/movies/into-the-abyss-by-werner-herzog-review.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210

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1. shades of truman capote. nt