Not since the Jacques Tati's triumphant triumvirate of visual splendors featuring Monsieur Hulot have I seen such a tightly executed, meticulously studied and skillfully integrated sequence of subtle, ironic visual meta-indicators. In one dynamic and efficient shot, filmmakers Garfield and Yonaitis have fashioned an incisive study of comedic understatement and concealment in the modern cinema of socialized terror and repression, symbolically refracting the most uniquely American apparatus of mortality, the Electric Chair, through the optical structures of a new regime of reactionary post-ironic tension, and in doing so simultaneously critiquing both their subject of behavioral evaluation and their own necessarily inadequate methods of penetrating the barriers of moral comprehension in Cold War era Georgia. Invoking the persistent physical oppression of Krzysztof Kieslowski's cinema of doubt, the filmmakers subject the elements of their mise-en-scène to rigorous competition with their own stylistic and cinematographic forms. The action culminates in a feverish and irreconcilable clash between mental and physical machineries of eradication and the circumstances of artistic sublimation both on and off the screen, the perplexed humor of which will not be unnoticed by astute and perceptive viewers.
