Despite the enormous gulf between them on this particular issue, there is an undeniable spark between them that continues on as they meet up at various stops on the execution circuit and chatting online before the relationship inevitably, if secretly, blooms into a full-blown romance. While Martha has effectively dedicated her entire life to proving her father’s freedom—her only other activity seems to be sometimes sleeping with the lawyer (Brian Geraghty) who has taken the case—and Benjamin is too young to remember his father as anything but a prisoner that he has hardly seen, Lucy is a little more conflicted and this unexpected relationship with Mercy offers her a genuine taste of freedom for once. Alas, things prove to be not that simple after all. It eventually transpires that Mercy may not have been completely forthcoming regarding certain aspects of her life. Another problem arises when Mercy offers to help Lucy with her family’s case by pointing them in the direction of new tests that could be applied to the old evidence that could prove that her dad is innocent—the flip side to that being that the very same test could also conclusively prove his guilt.
In case you hadn’t figured it out by now, “My Days of Mercy” is an Issue Movie but while most films of that type are satisfied with focusing on one key issue, Jim Barton’s screenplay tries to cram so many of them into 108 minutes that the late Stanley Kramer, who spent nearly his entire career on making issue-oriented projects as a producer and director, might have advised him and director Tali Shalon-Ezer to ease up a bit. Perhaps there is a way of taking all of the various story points of the sort on display here and transforming them into a convincing narrative but that has not happened here. Instead, the narrative feels more like a checklist than anything else, and contains too many scenes that exist simply to move the story along even though doing so requires the characters to act in sometimes befuddling ways.
What is especially frustrating in the case of this film is that it is just good enough at times to suggest what might have been accomplished with a more plausible screenplay. The performances by Page and Mara are strong and convincing and generate real heat between them, at least during the scenes where they are able to break free of the machinations of the screenplay; the same thing goes for Amy Seimetz’s turn as the older sister. Making her American debut, Israeli director Shalom-Ezer demonstrates a good eye and a nice feel for character work that eventually gets subsumed beneath all the murky melodrama and emotional cop-outs. There are even brief moments of humor that cut through the gloom—after catching the lawyer leaving after spending the night with Martha, Lucy snark-bombs him with a comment about his “pro-boner” work—and a running bit about prisoner last meals that has an unexpectedly moving payoff.
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