The Life Of David Gale

Synopsis: David Gale (Kevin Spacey) is on death row and due for execution in four days.  A former  philosophy professor at the University of Texas, as well as an anti capital punishment activist with a high profile lobby group, he has be convicted of the rape and murder of a fellow worker (Laura Linney) despite his plea of innocence.  In order to save his reputation in the eyes of his son, he requests a young journalist, Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslett) meet with him in an exclusive interview in the final days before his death. 

This film was comprehensively panned on release, the two main grounds being that it was a bleeding heart liberal anti-capital punishment tract and that the contrivances required to pull off the plot were excessive.  Don’t be put off. Yes, the plot is  improbable but for all the appearance of being an issue-based film, The Life Of David Gale is essentially a thriller and since when has plot contrivance been an issue with that genre?  Compared to Fincher’s The Game or even Se7en, Alan Parker’s film is modest in its demands on our credulity. And precisely because the film is a thriller the charge that it is flagrantly pleading a case against the death penalty is misguided.  Its characters are it is true but the fact that the plot is too far-fetched means that it is relatively worthless in that respect. 

As with all the thrillers. the point of the exercise is following the twists and turns of the plot. In the case of The Life Of David Gale this works as the film gives us clues, false leads and meta-narrative connections to get us on our way.  The film is structured around the three stages of Ms Bloom’s visit, in each two hour session Gale telling her what really happened which we see in flashback. As you’d expect the latter starts off convinced of his guilt and gradually is turned around here but the question for us the audience is what is Gale doing in prison at all.  For a start there is something very odd about an anti-capital punishment activist ending up on death row. He could have been framed but Spacey is too much in the Kaiser Sozay mode of pitiful for us not to suspect that something else is going on. The film defies our expectations and draws out the subterfuge gradually over the film’s running time.

What makes the film work is that unlike so many thrillers, it’s not just about plot twists. The relationship between Gale and Laura Linney as his colleague and fellow activist, Constance Hallaway, gives proceedings a dramatic depth unusual for the genre.  As the film progresses this assumes greater importance to the narrative, ultimately meshing with the thriller plot.  Some may consider the big reveal  a bridge too far but consistent with the film’s cleverness this was prefigured in the lecture on Lacan and moral philosophy that Prof. Gale gives to his students (and perhaps in the title of his book “Dialogical Exhaustion” which I paraphrased as “When words fail”).

The Life Of David Gale is an unjustly maligned film.  Which not to say that Alan Parker was the best choice of director.  A director of a subtler, more intellectual stripe, say a Michael Haneke, might have given us a very different (and thereby presumably a better) film, one that brought out its Nabokovian ironies.

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