The Life of David Gale (2003)

Whether you are pro or anti death penalty, there's not getting past the sensational, brave, and maybe insane elements of this story. Based on fact about a death row inmate who had been famous as a death row protester, the core of the movie is how a young reporter (a convincing Kate Winslet) interviews the inmate (an equally convincing Kevin Spacey) in the days before his scheduled execution. We are gradually shown the backstory through their interviews, and another story builds as the reporter chases down new leads, including missing video evidence. Laura Linney plays an important third lead that starts to throw doubts into everyone's mind, including the audience's.

All of this sounds like a great movie should have come out of it: superb casting and acting, a great story with believable but astounding twists, and a nice tight framework, day by day, with methodical flashbacks. Instead the movie both tries too hard and fumbles some of the key moments. What is clearly dramatic is sometimes made over-dramatic (Winslet running and running and running, or words like "innocent" spinning across the screen between scenes). Other sensationalist add-ons make the movie cheap (seeing a chaingang neatly working along the road just as they drive by). And simple reactions aren't believable (they way characters respond to someone following them, or to other threats). This is important stuff for a movie trying to recreate the truth.

By my guess, the director is the key suspect, though he has a raft of successful films behind him, including the closest echo, Midnight Express (1978),which is about injustice and a prisoner who is extraordinary. But in all his films (that I've seen, which is quite a few, it turns out),there is a feeling of powerful story line carrying the day (Mississippi Burning, Birdy). Parker has also made a series of films tied to contemporary music, from Evita which is fair to The Commitments which is terrific fun, as well as The Wall, which might be his best film in all, though a difficult one. All of these films have a great setting, either musically or geographically.

Here we have only the dull backdrop of conservative Texas (if that's not redundant). And a blazing, heartwrenching story. Which is fair enough as a start. The Life of David Gale is a powerful morality tale, most of all, with some great acting, and many or most people watching will be glad they saw it. All those little flaws fade further and further as you get toward the end.

And then the end, the famous big final twist. That's memorable stuff. Wow.

You may think this film is a thriller about the death penalty, but it is not. It looks like it, true, but the end reveals it is something completely different. It is about the way the media can be manipulated in any direction, provided you are intelligent. Once a brilliant university professor was confronted in a TV debate to the governor of Texas about the death penalty. The governor asked him to give the name of one executed person that was innocent and could be proved so. The professor could not answer such a question for the simple reason that there is no post mortem investigation in the case of an execution, except… And the professor started, with his main assistant in his fight against the death penalty, to think of how to prove that point. In the mean time he is tricked by some dumb girl student into doing exactly what he should never have done: have sex with her. She sue him for rape, even if later she will drop the charge. The damage is done. He is kicked out of academia. His wife takes his son away and gets a divorce. She sells the house. He cannot even get a job as the manager of a technical store. He is reduced to nothing, to being a rapist forever. But he does not want to move. His main assistant in his fight is going to die of leukemia. When he learns that, the plan to trap the governor germinates in their minds and they put it through. He is going to be accused of the murder of his assistant though it is not a murder. The evidence it is not is a tape, the recording of what really happened. But it will come in three pieces. The man will be sentenced to death. Three days before his execution he asks a famous journalist from New York to come and take the first and last interview he is going to give her in six hours spread out over the three days before his execution. The first excerpt of the tape we have mentioned will turn up in the journalist's motel room on the second day, before execution, too short and a copy. Worthless. Then after some adventure the journalist manages to recuperate what she thinks is the whole tape that proves what she was thinking, after some personal experimentation, is right: the woman killed herself, but who worked the camera? A man that is seen at the end of the tape, a man the journalist has seen here and there and in whose shack she has found the tape. But that too is too short though not worthless. It creates havoc and it proves an innocent man can be sentenced to death. During that time the $500,000 for the interview travel to Mexico and the ex-wife for the son. The father had been vindicated in the mean time. But the journalist finally receives the last excerpt of the tape, the end of the suicidal demonstrative séance and there the professor is shown coming at this very moment, just after the death of the woman, just as if he had been behind the camera all the time and he turns that camera off, after checking the woman is dead. The media had been manipulated about the guilt of the man and about the fairness and justice of the death penalty, then about the man's innocence and the suicide of the woman, and yet the truth was that the death had been planned in such a way that the execution would demonstrate how an innocent person can be sentenced to death. Manipulation all along by a woman who wanted to make her natural death useful for the cause she advocated and by a man who did not have the courage to move on and start a new life after having been destroyed by an unscrupulous student and by his own dumbness: students are out of reach as long as they are within grading distance. He preferred to make his death (which becomes a very special suicide) useful for the cause he advocated and for his own son. But the film is short because two men helped the woman and staged her death and the man lied all along the way of his confession and ordeal. The media are so naïve that they believe anything provided it smells slightly sulfurous or sulfuric.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

Reporter Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet) is asked by reclusive Texas death row prisoner David Gale (Kevin Spacey) to do interviews in his last four days. Gale was a sincere anti-death penalty organization Deathwatch member and college professor who raped and killed fellow member Constance Harraway (Laura Linney). Disgruntled student Berlin (Rhona Mitra) seduced the married David and filed a rape charge. His wife took their son away. Berlin ran off. Despite the charges being dropped, he lost his job and became a drunk. In the present, Bitsey and her chaperon Zack Stemmons are followed by a mysterious cowboy.

There is a big twist in this movie. It is ultimately a cheat because it wouldn't work politically. The premise is twisted to the extreme until it stops making sense. The worst part is that it feels like a cheat. The movie could have said something poignant about the death penalty but in the end, it says something about the simplicity of this argument.