If you boil a film down to its barest essentials, what you are left with is simply a story. Telling this story in a myriad of ways is the beauty of film. In documentary filmmaking, the challenge lies in presenting this story in a truthful manner. Someone who is heralded as one of the leaders in this genre is Errol Morris. Morris, whose A Brief History of Time and The Thin Blue Line are visionary, seems to have outdone himself again with Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter.

When you first look at Fred Leuchter, you realize that he has been an underdog from the minute he was born. A typical balding, 70's suit wearing, 50ish American you cram onto the subway with every morning. He could be a tax attorney, a Physics teacher, or someone who buys Big & Beautiful. The last thing you would ever think is that little, innocent man builds electric chairs, hanging galleys, and lethal injection machines. Before you start Instant Messaging your co-workers about this sick guy, listen to what Fred Leuchter has to say: He makes those devices of death better. As happens almost every time in this world, the first of anything is usually a failure. Most of the penitentiaries throughout this country are filled with crude equipment dating back over 100 years. In case you were wondering, when you fail to kill someone by electrocution within the first few moments, the skin begins to boil, their face melts, and other pleasantries that come with being jolted with thousands of watts of electricity.

Initially, it is difficult to understand what kind of man Fred Leuchter truly is; someone whose father worked in a prison and from an early age was surrounded by death, a man who opened an electric chair in his front yard with unyielding glee. How can it be possible to relate to a sociopath of this nature? But you begin to slowly understand that Leuchter was simply a man consumed by his passion to create and help. There has to be someone who must be responsible for creating and governing the building of these horrific machines. Leuchter understood his role in the world and cherished every moment of it. However, as in Greek Theater, our protagonist encounters his tragic downfall.

In 1998, a man that he had never met or had even heard about contacted Fred Leuchter. Ernst Zundel, a neo-Nazi supporter, had written an article in Canada denouncing the Holocaust as fiction. After being arrested for writing inflammatory material, Zundel contacted Leuchter to fly to Aushwitz and perform scientific tests. Leuchter's growing naiveté and lack of any insight begins to become apparent. Leuchter states often throughout the film that "because he built an electric chair, he is no more qualified to apply those techniques to say, building a hanging galley". Even with his own misgivings about his qualifications, he still maintains the fact that he is "the only person in the world" who could do this job. After gathering a multitude of evidence and conducting experiments, Leuchter returns to Canada and testifies that with his findings, the gas chambers in Poland could not have been used to kill thousands of people. He then becomes vilified in the press and becomes associated with hate groups around the world. Soon after, Leuchter is unemployed, penniless, divorced, and must relocate across the country.

Fred Leuchter never committed any crime, nor ever passed any judgement over those who chose to do so. Whether their sentence was fair or not, is another argument. Leuchter was doing everything in his power to give those sentenced a humane way of accepting their fate. The price of knowing your exact moment of death is penalty enough; at least you don't have to be put through excruciating pain before hoping to die.

Leuchter's unabashed enthusiasm for his job forced him to view the facts in a distorted manner. Throughout the trial it was revealed that Leuchter never had any scientific training and was not even a qualified engineer in the state of Massachusetts. Sometimes, you only see what you want to see. In the end, this film is neither a film about the death penalty or about death itself. Rather it deals with the complex issues surrounding the "rise and fall" of Fred Leuchter. In ninety minutes, you are presented with amazing clarity about the circumstances of a situation, infinitely more so than what is spoon-fed to viewers during the evening newscast.

Errol Morris is a genius. He continually forces the audience to think outside of their normal boundaries to encounter a new and fascinating story. His movies are usually referred to as "pseudo-documentaries" because he chooses to add his own visual elements and style. This semantic difference has caused Morris to eliminate himself from both the documentary and film categories of awards, which is a complete oversight by any awards committee. In filming a documentary, the question of "do you film the story, or does the story film you?" continually arises. Morris seems to traverse this slippery slope with his perfect mixture of video Q&A, film, narrative, and rewind. You can see him peeking from behind the lens, but his subtlety never lets loose his true feelings. From a pure filmmaking standpoint, Mr. Death was one of the best movies of 1999.