Into the Abyss

I think this is the third or fourth documentary of Werner Herzog's I've watched. As with the others his personal passion about his subject is evidently displayed.

This documentary focuses on the case of a Texan who is on death row.  Herzog interview this young man as well as his cohort in crime--who was also convicted and is in prison; the cohort's father, who has been in and out of correctional facilities all his life and contemplates how this has affected the life of his son (as well as another son who is also in prison); relatives of a couple of the murder victims; an ex-executioner who no longer could deal emotionally with his job and had to quit; a policeman who worked on this particular case; and a woman who was some sort of caseworker for the cohort and eventually married him (the film did not make clear what her initial involvement was on his case).

In the interviews Herzog asks questions about their feelings and experiences, as well as injects some of his own views about capital punishment. Although I can understand that a filmmaker can have a passion about any particular subject, I find Herzog kind of invasive and in this particular film I was not really sure what his object was. Supposedly it was to show his personal anti-death penalty views, but it felt more like he was indulging himself (as I feel he does also in other docs) by having the opportunity to support his passion by pushing people to say and do more than they want, to give people their fifteen minutes of fame whether they want it or not. The title talks about an "abyss" but the film doesn't really address this.