In The Life of David Gale,
Kate Winslet plays a reporter for an American news magazine who is
sent down to a prison in Texas to interview the title character
(played by Kevin Spacey), a philosophy professor and outspoken
opponent of the death penalty who has landed on death row himself
after being convicted of committing a rape and murder. Did he really
do it? Has been set up by his enemies, political or otherwise? The
reporter has three days to talk to Gale before his scheduled
execution, which shows no signs of being delayed, and to get at the
truth.
Alan Parker has directed the
picture, from an original screenplay by Charles Randolph, and, as in
Mississippi Burning, he is in his crusading mode, here. Or so
it would appear. Winslet's character is named Bitsey Bloom, works
for a glossy magazine named "NEWS", and is described
(jocularly, one would hope) as "Mike Wallace with P.M.S.";
she got into trouble over her
last story, on child pornography, because she wouldn't reveal all
her sources. Accompanied to Texas by a young intern (Gabriel Mann)
who serves as both her flunky and as comic relief, they enter a land
of bar-b-q joints, no cell-phone service, coiled barbed wire, and
big menacing men with guns. During Gale's interview sessions, we
see, as the camera spirals outward, his recent history unfold in
flashback: this includes Gale having consensual sex with a female
student ("Bite me!" she instructs) who then turns around
and yells "rape" on him; the dissolution of his marriage,
his career, his advocacy, and winding up as an alcoholic in a motel
that's such a dive it has mud instead of water in its swimming pool;
Gale's relationship with a another anti-death penalty advocate,
played by Laura Linney; and a videotape which provides clues that
indicate that the murder for which Gale was tried really was a
set-up. (Bitsy and the intern even go so far as to, dangerously,
re-enact the murder, to show that some things which should have
occurred while it was being committed did not.)
While I will try to avoid letting slip the two big surprise twists which figure prominently in the movie (as Hitchcock or William Castle would say, they're the only ones it's got), I will state that two of the characters are shown acting in such a way that repudiates, to an outrageously grotesque degree, everything that they've spoken about, stood for, and professed to believe in, and that a third character becomes the victim of a mind game whose results can only be described as being frankly sadistic. Life of David Gale turns out to be all about manipulation. The death-penalty opponents in the film want to show that "innocents", in spite of what the Texas politicians in the movie are shown saying, really do go to the death chamber. The film doesn't go about trying to prove its point by presenting an argument and providing evidence and proof to support its claim -- if it did, it could've easily drawn upon matters of public record which document many, many actual cases where people were executed, or narrowly avoided it, for crimes they did not commit. Instead, the movie handles everything as if it were all one-upmanship. The only way the death penalty "abolitionists" can win is by doing something so outrageous that it would render their opposition powerless, even if it ends up turning themselves into extreme hypocrites.
The film opens with Winslet making
an Arthur Chipping-like sprint down a road, as if she were trying to
get away from someone or trying to get somewhere on short notice;
two hours later, we find out why. This would mean something if the
picture presented us with characters who actually engaged us, but it
does not: Winslet and Spacey deliver almost neutral performances
(Spacey has NEVER been the same ever since he won the Oscar for American
Beauty), and Linney only manages to do slightly better in
bringing some shading and dimension to her role. Which is probably
why, after starting out as if it were sincere in its intent, showing
the characters bucketing-out on their convictions, with no grief or
conscience, seems twice as offensive, especially after the second
surprise plot twist is delivered to us, right between the eyes,
right before the closing credits roll, and we are only allowed to
respond either one way or the other.
Review by Gregory Avery · Nitrate Online
