True-life account of a Texas novelist who, having acquired an obsession with death after the hit-and-run killing of her teenage son, begins an unlikely friendship with a convicted murderess on Death Row awaiting execution. While I agree with the general criticisms that this TV-movie is underpopulated and one-sided, and perhaps not completely true to the facts of the case regarding uneducated prostitute/drug addict/killer Karla Faye Tucker, its sole objective is uncover the bond between the two women involved--not to be an investigative journal of the crimes. In fact, the black-and-white flashbacks involving both the past histories of Diane Keaton's Beverly Lowry and Jennifer Jason Leigh's Tucker are the film's weakest link. The present-day relationship is the real story; there's another version to be told, yes, but Lowy's connection with the doomed Karla Faye is the focus this time, and it's quite moving. Comparisons to other Death Row films ("Dead Man Walking" in particular) aren't really useful here because the scope of the drama is much smaller (perhaps due to the constraints of a television budget). However, the emotions and tensions are just as raw and vivid, and Keaton, who had been giving mediocre performances for years before this, turns in a solid job. Director Bobby Roth tries hard to be graceful and balanced, occasionally slipping into second-class melodrama yet really involving the viewer in these lives. Karla Faye Tucker was not a good-girl-gone-bad, she lived a savage life, but the attempt is to bring out the humanistic characteristics in the woman who, on the eve of her demise by lethal injection, touched a few lives by chance. Worth-seeing.
