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Tim Blake Nelson’s “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” is a gripping, wrenching, dark-as-midnight crime drama that taps into a phenomenon many might view as an underground secret (or maybe they just don’t know enough
about it): the relationship that develops, more often than you’d think, between incarcerated violent criminals and civilians who fall in love with them. Often, it starts with an exchange of letters. But in “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” Karen (Amanda Seyfried), a teacher who’s looking for an escape from her oppressive marriage and her dead-end life, finds work leading a creative-writing class at a maximum-security prison in Oklahoma.
One of the prisoners, Wilson Shedd (Scoot McNairy), has a snaky menace about him, but he’s clearly intelligent, and he’s actually interested in reading Hemingway short stories and trying his own hand at writing. When one of the other prisoners starts to bait Karen with hostile leering comments, Wilson warns him to back down. (When he doesn’t, the situation gets taken care of in a bloodier way.) With his quiet drawl and sociopathic flatness, Wilson has a mean charm that sneaks up on you, though it takes the audience a while to realize what he’s up to regarding Karen. He’s playing her.
Early on, there’s a jarring cut: to a scene of Wilson and two other prisoners in the outside world, still in their dirty orange prison uniforms, using an axe to bust into someone’s home. They have obviously escaped. But this is quite the dramatic flash-forward, and it sets the tone and structure of the movie — that Nelson, who wrote and directed it, is going to be jumping around in chronology, in what feels almost like a “Pulp Fiction” time loop, to undercut any tidy narrative stability. The fractured time scheme works powerfully; it keeps the audience on edge and triggers connections we wouldn’t otherwise make.
That said, to plug into the drama of “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” you need to accept that Amanda Seyfried’s Karen, who seems smart and canny and aware of things, could start receiving confessional letters from a prisoner like Wilson and be seduced by them — drawn into his spell of damaged “vulnerability.” Surveying Seyfried’s no-nonsense crispness, you might say, “Nope, that wouldn’t happen.” But the film lays the emotional groundwork for it (she convinces herself that he can save her), and part of what’s scary and fascinating is that what happens does chafe against our common sense, and the common sense we want our heroine to have. This, the film seems to be saying, is not a rational relationship. It’s a bond of counterintuitive danger, and that’s its allure.
Tim Blake Nelson is a great actor who’s been directing independent dramas for 30 years. I’ve been a fan ever since I saw his first one, “Eye of God” (also a bleak crime film with a tricky time scheme), back at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997. I thought he became major with “The Grey Zone” (2001), a Holocaust drama unlike any other. It put you right there in the camps, along with the Sonderkommando (the Jewish prisoners who led victims into the gas chambers and then disposed of the bodies); it had a queasiness you couldn’t shake off. “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” is only Nelson’s sixth feature, and it’s his strongest since “The Grey Zone.” It holds you with the stark realism of its craft (this is a film about criminals but not a “thriller”), and with what it’s about: how human violence carves out its own realm of existence, and then feeds on itself.
The staging has an ominous matter-of-fact authority, whether it’s Karen fighting with her lout of a husband (Grant Harvey) or Wilson using the hardware-store tools Karen sneaks into him to start chiseling away at his escape. I’ve never seen Scoot McNairy give a performance this rich — it’s as if he’s playing someone like Gary Gilmore, his personality wary and contained, magnetically so, until he draws on the violence that’s been simmering in him for a lifetime. (Even when he does, it’s contained.) There’s a nice Black family, the Lawsons (William Jackson Harper and Devyn A. Tyler), who are taking a trip with their kids (Xuri Selah and Eric Blount) in their SUV, and what happens to them on a picnic is so horrifying that I nearly had to turn away. Yet Nelson directs a scene like this with unfussy bravura, so that there’s a need to look, to confront what evil is.
There’s one more level of violence in “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd.” Let’s call it state-sanctioned violence. What should we do with people like Wilson Shedd? Should they become the lightning rod of our vengeance? Or if not, are we refusing to close the circle? There is nothing supernatural about “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” but as the film’s title suggests, Wilson undergoes more than one death. There’s the one that society hands him. And there’s the one he inflicted on himself, the one we might call not soul murder but soul suicide. Maybe society should have left it there, but you could also say that it’s our responsibility to put a man like this one out of his misery.
