As an expert witness for the defense in 1990, Leuchter criticized the Florida penal system's electric chair

January 12, 2000
Web posted at: 3:48 p.m. EST (2048 GMT)

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- Errol Morris is best described as a documentary filmmaker, though not in the customary sense of the word. His movies are esoteric, floating slices of consciousness that practically evolve before your very eyes.

"The Thin Blue Line" (1988) and "A Brief History of Time" (1992) are two of the most uniquely powerful films of the past 20 years, but the fact that they tell astonishing stories is just part of their allure. Morris uncovers mysterious pieces of information that the viewer has to pull into focus. You're forced to participate when you watch his movies; spoon-feeding is the furthest thing from his mind.

Morris has said that his work is about people who construct personal variations on reality. This makes for strangely unnerving essays that encourage audience members to ponder the validity of their own world views.

Sometimes the results are too indistinct to maintain full interest. "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" (1997), though consistently thought-provoking and often quite moving, is sometimes overwhelmed by its thematic ambiguity. But if genius is at least partially composed of communicating complex ideas in a precise manner that rises above the commonplace, Morris is the real thing.

It's perfectly fitting that the people who run the Academy Awards have said that his movies aren't really documentaries, so they won't nominate them in that category. Or any other category, for that matter. Morris should get an award for not being able to win an award that he obviously deserves.

This year's best documentary that isn't really a documentary is (the envelope please): "Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr." Leuchter is a simultaneously strange and commonplace beast; a man who wallows in evil by growing convinced that his detachment separates him from the darkest corners of the human spirit. The first part of the film traces Leuchter's career path as the world's leading expert in criminal executions.

Leuchter explains, in often stomach-churning detail, how and why he took it upon himself to start building more effective electric chairs, gallows, gas chambers and lethal injection devices. Anyone who freaked out over that prisoner's head bursting into flames during the execution scene in "The Green Mile" had better stay far away from "Mr. Death."

Leuchter casually explains that the skin on electrocuted inmates often cooks and falls off their bones "like chicken," and there's a disturbing black-and-white clip of an elephant receiving a fatal blast of current. It was filmed by Thomas Edison, for audience consumption. Morris seems to be implying that Leuchter's fascination with death is hardly unique, and he bravely implicates the viewer by showing Edison's footage. As horrendous as it is, it's difficult to look away.

Leuchter's disconnection from the harsher realities of his chosen task in life is, at first anyway, bleakly hysterical. Morris has a gift for getting his subjects to spill their guts in front of his camera, and Leuchter's ego won't allow him to pass up the opportunity.

He's a short, balding man in his 50s who describes an apparently happy childhood that was spent assisting his prison-guard father. Young Fred used to visit the room in the prison that stored the electric chair, and he now marvels that he was in the same place where "people like Sacco and Vanzetti were executed." You'd think it was the next best thing to meeting Joe DiMaggio.

Leuchter is doing a job that has to be done as long as there are legal executions in this country. But his enthusiasm for the task eventually makes your skin crawl.

Most unsettling of all is a series of snapshots that show Fred excitedly opening the crate that contains a spanking new electric chair. It's been delivered to his suburban home, and he playfully straps himself in, right there in the front yard. He's dressed in casual wear that wouldn't look out of place at a barbecue, but you have to figure that this isn't the type of barbecuing device that the neighbors envisioned when he first moved in.

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Then Leuchter's story takes a vile, wildly unexpected turn.

In 1988, he was recruited by a neo-Nazi "historical revisionist" to debunk the supposed myth of the Holocaust. Since he knows so much about execution by poisonous gas, Leuchter is flown to Poland, where he secretly enters the death chambers at Auschwitz. He's shown -- in video footage shot by his cohorts -- surreptitiously chipping away at the walls of that horrid place, gathering samples that will later be tested for traces of gas.

Morris intercuts this footage with stylized re-enactments of the desecration, creating a mournful monument to one man's self-delusion. Leuchter's comments as he collects the concrete chips waver between "scientific" research -- it soon becomes clear that he has no idea how to properly examine the fragments for telltale poison -- and outright giddiness. It's like watching an intelligent person get excited by kicking over tombstones.

Suddenly, the film isn't about death so much as it's about one man's personal folly. Leuchter becomes the toast of the white supremacy luncheon circuit, making ludicrous speeches about his "discovery" that millions of Jews couldn't possibly have died in the concentration camps. Never mind that, with even a small amount of library research, he would have found irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

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Leuchter has gone from toiling away in seclusion to being applauded by large groups of people. The gleam in his eye as he's hailed for these speeches speaks volumes. Leuchter is finally receiving public acceptance for his overriding death obsession. He's suddenly the star of his own passion play.

Morris examines the ugliness of this story with his usual distance, allowing hypnotic visuals and the viewer's (hopefully utilized) thought processes to paint the details of the horror. Ultimately, he seems to be saying that not allowing yourself to recognize fully apparent evil is tantamount to participating in it. It's a lesson that will haunt Germany for years to come. Once again, Morris has made a compelling, devastating film that hardly anyone will bother to see. That's what he gets for being a genius.

"Mr. Death" is not the kind of movie that you watch while sucking on Twizzlers. A sense of dread ebbs and flows throughout the narrative, and some people simply won't be able to handle the subject matter. But fear of examining genocide creates a social order that repeatedly allows for it. In that sense, the movie is almost heroic. Not rated. 91 minutes.