When new DNA tests arranged by their lawyer (Brian Geraghty) point conclusively to Simon’s guilt, Martha’s world falls apart for a couple of screen minutes but she soon gets over it. Since Martha is also the driving force behind the family’s appearance at Death Row demos, the implication is that the Moro siblings wouldn’t have become involved in this if they’d thought their father had committed murder. has always been sure that Simon was wrongly convicted. While Lucy, fourteen when their mother was murdered, has continued to harbour doubts as to their father’s innocence of the crime, her big sister. As the film dribbles on, they exchange a few cross words about Death Row issues but these don’t amount to much and the divide seems geographical as much as political. Although their difference of opinion about capital punishment is set up as a chasm between the protagonists, it doesn’t stop Mercy from promptly making moves to start a relationship between them or Lucy from responding tentatively but positively. Not for long, though: it’s soon obviously just a means of ensuring that Lucy and Mercy can-go-on-meeting-like-this. The lifestyle of Lucy, Martha and Benjamin – driving long journeys to protest impending executions in different states – piques your interest at first because it’s so unusual. (The guilty man, we’re told, has some kind of learning disability: a bizarrely anxious detail – the film-makers seem worried we might think it was OK for a non-disabled person to be executed.) It soon emerges too that the Moro siblings’ father Simon (Elias Koteas) is himself on Death Row, for the murder eight years ago of his wife and their mother. The man about to die in Kentucky is the killer of Mercy’s father’s former partner in crime prevention. People of Shalom Ezer’s and Barton’s age and background can hardly be blamed for viewing Death Row America as a remote, antique land of barbarism but it’s objectionable that they assume that, in order fully to engage the audience, the main characters in My Days of Mercy must have a strong personal investment in capital punishment. The screenwriter Joe Barton is a Londoner, born (from the look of his photograph and CV online) well after the abolition of the death penalty in Britain. Whereas legal execution still operates today in thirty-one US states, the film’s director Tali Shalom Ezer is from Israel, which, since the founding of the modern state, has never had a system of capital punishment.
In spite of My Days of Mercy’s purportedly ‘challenging’ themes, it uses the death penalty debate in America as no more than grist to the (melo)dramatic mill. The quasi-documentary flavour of this motif is misleading. On the left-hand side, text summarises the prisoner’s crime and Death Row location. Every so often in the film, a plate of food, representing the last meal of a condemned man (it is always a man), appears on the right-hand side of the screen. Mercy is accompanying her mother (Denise Dal Vara) and father (Kevin Crowley) – a senior police officer and leading light in a survivors-of-homicide group for whom the death sentence means necessary justice.
Lucy Moro, her elder sister Martha (Amy Seimetz) and younger brother Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell) are there as part of the anti-capital punishment lobby. They first see each other on literally opposing sides of an argument: both are among demonstrators outside a Kentucky prison where an execution is shortly to take place. Lucy, from a working-class family in small-town Ohio, is out of work. The opposites are morose, awkward, lank-haired Lucy (Ellen Page) and fragrant, blonde, self-assured Mercy (Kate Mara). My Days of Mercy, which opened this year’s LGBTQ+ festival at BFI, is an attraction-of-opposites love story.
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