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According to the trailer, The Life of David Gale is "a story about how far people will go in the name of a cause." Oh good. "Now, one reporter has three days to unravel the mystery, two days to discover the truth, and one day to change his fate." Meet David Gale (Kevin Spacey) and The Life of him (Kevin Spacey). He's a death penalty abolitionist (tuck that away for later, now... it'll be useful!). The trailer tells us that he's a brainy-type. He went to Harvard, he's written a few books, and he appears to be a college professor. He's had a few run-ins with the law, of course, organizing protests and believing what he's not supposed to believe, dashing rakehell that he is. All the same, he is generally well respected and thought to be a pretty nice guy. In this respect he's much like Keven Spacey the actor. Somewhere along the way, however, David Gale somehow manages to screw everything up with bad luck and poor choices. In this respect David Gale is much like Kevin Spacey the present-day actor, with his recent knack for picking great dramatic-sounding films (K-PAX, Pay it Forward, Shipping News, Life of David Gale) that end up either blowing (K-PAX, Shipping News) or sucking (Pay it Forward, Life of David Gale). Before you can say "But that's so contriv—", three separate courts convict Gale for the clumsy murder of an activist he met while picketing against capital punishment, and he ends up on death row for the crime (leading one to think either "Wow, that's ironic" or "Wow, that's stupid" and be right either way). By this point, Gale begins to reek of gratuitously false advertising in the titling alone. If the trailer is to be believed, we're not really getting the "life" of David Gale at all. Just the saccharine and stultifyingly boring last few days of it. Perhaps The Last Little Sanctimonious Part of the Life of David Gale wouldn't fit on a marquee. Following in the footsteps of nearly every other death row-drama film that came before it, David Gale, like most convicted murderers about to be killed, wants everyone to believe he's innocent—and his only hope is for a doe-eyed, resourceful woman to work past her assumptions and sympathize with him. Enter Bitsey Bloom (no, really), played by Winslet. Following the same death row-drama film conventions, our heroine single-handedly finds a pile of sparkling new evidence in a day that directly contradicts the police investigation conducted over the course of several months by a team of trained detectives with a large operating budget. A typical bit of "sleuthing" on the part of Bitsey has her driving some lanky Arts major around in her car while he espouses bong-dappled philosophy at her. If only the police had thought to give Marxist pot-dealing film grads a lift while investigating, we could have closed the book on hundreds of unsolved crimes—like "The Case of the Missing Pepsi in the Dorm Room Fridge" or "The Case of Pulling Over to White Castle, I'm Starving", to name but two. "This murder's way too clumsy," concludes the lanky Arts major, apparently a professional forensic scientist when not otherwise occupied with heating up hash knives over an oven outlet with an empty toilet paper roll in his mouth. "This guy is a major intellectual, top of his Harvard class, two books published. It doesn't make sense." He makes an airtight case, provided we accept the two major lodestones of his argument—namely, that published Harvard grads with good marks are all scrupulously excellent murderers, and that clumsy murders are securely in the realm of unpublished Harvard grads at the bottom of their class. Of course we shouldn't accept this, since it's wrong and also kind of just idiotic (he only took one Harvard class?). But Kate Winslet, already foggy and bloated from the trip to White Castle, is certain she's been given the key to freeing David Gale. After uncovering the truth, she tries to convince the legal system of his innocence before it's too late. We then throw in a little corruption in the legal system and a pinch of nefarious deeds behind the scenes, and voila! Instant blockbuster. If the movie can convince its viewers that we haven't seen it all before, that is. I assure you, most
of us have seen this before, or at least something similar. We've had
different sympathizers (nun, federal agent, doctor, over-achieving student),
but it's all still there. The Life of David Gale's lone new twist
appears to be that the protagonist is named Bitsey—and even then,
while admittedly original, it's probably unwise to encourage any film
that advocates giving a pet's name to a
human being. If we don't draw the line somewhere, expect The Life
of Bitsy-Boo Boo Snookums Gale in theaters by 2004. The main problem I had with Gale was that it preys upon our middle-class liberal sympathies and bullies us in the direction of supporting one side of a very loaded issue in the US. The moral of the story, as it seems right now, is supposed to hit you square in the temple like a twenty-pound sledgehammer: the death penalty is bad and Dubya Bush is a bad, bad boy for liking the death penalty. Oh, and maybe you support the death penalty too? Well, what if we put a cuddly little teddy bear like Kevin Spacey in the Chair? What do you think now, huh? He's such a nice guy! Now look what you did! You made Kate Winslet cry! David Gale himself chimes in with his take: "No one who looks through that glass sees a person, they see a crime. I'm not David Gale—I'm a murderer, four days shy of his execution."
But of course David Gale isn't a murderer. From what we can see in the trailer, The Life of David Gale is little more than a vehicle for blunt commentary on our perceptions of punishment and stigmas against convicts. Should we judge convicts based on our understanding of their actions or our understanding of who they really are—or is there an even greater chance of confusing the issue if we do? The whole subtext is actually somewhat comic in its ham-handed obviousness. I mean, how likely is it that something like this would actually happen in real life? The abolitionist becoming the victim of the very thing he was trying to abolish, framed by what appears to be an evil cadre of state-sponsored death penalty supporters? And three judges and three juries didn't rub their chins and say "Hmmmm….you know, something smells fishy about this"? The plot is so oafishly poetic, so bluntly ironic, that you're expected to eat up anything they tell you with a tablespoon, regardless of your personal politics on this matter. Maybe they should have titled the movie Death Penalty = BAD! to dumb it down even more—and that would still be a better title than The Life of David Gale. After the trailer ended, I was surprised by how unengaged I felt. I mean, the elements were all there: I generally like prison movies, I like Kevin Spacey, and Alan Parker's a talented director. It also set up some elements of mystery and suspense with the "Is he really innocent?" angle and the running and the helicopters and the gunshots and so on. But after the trailer ended, I just couldn't give a rat's ass about whether or not Spacey was innocent or not. And for a trailer like this, that's game-over. The best thing I can say about the movie so far is that it'll come to the rescue if you want to watch Dead Man Walking, The Hurricane, and K-PAX, but you only have two hours to burn. At one point, Spacey challenges Winslet, saying "You know I'm innocent…" and she replies, "No, I don't." I don't know either,
and quite frankly, I don't care.
RATING:
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Like
everyone else on Earth, I like Kevin Spacey. Even when playing a psychopath,
he carries it with a certain adorable teddybear-ness—that wry sense
of humour, that trademark half-smile, that whatever pheremone it is
he must produce that convinces everyone to like a man who stars in burrito
stool like K-PAX with a straight face. This pheremone (genialdrone,
by its scientific name) seems to be exuding in full force for The
Life of David Gale, Spacey's latest offering, since I was interested
in finding out more about it from the beginning, even while every defense
mechanism built into my body was going off in alarums.
Well,
yeah. Dude, you're a murderer. "Why can't people see me
for who I am?" Because you're accused of murdering people.
As a person who isn't avid to get brutally murdered any time soon, I
applaud society for taking the time to see crimes and not people, since
it will allow me to better fulfill my goal of not getting killed. The
last thing I'd want if I had, say, a dinner party is to get brutally
murdered, only to have a guest say afterwards, "Oh, right, I should
have said. David Gale's, like, a killer? Sorry. I just don't see crimes,
man—I see people." Gosh, thanks. Next time, take the
time to point out any people convicted of first degree murder before
I start handing out the steak knives, okay?
