REVIEW BY HELEN REDMOND
The Life of David Gale
Directed by Alan Parker
With Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet and Laura Linney
At major cinemas
Now should be the best time ever for a Hollywood drama that exposes the barbarity of the death penalty in the United States and makes the case for its abolition. In the last few years, support for the death penalty in the US has declined, as the flaws in the system — sleep-walking defence lawyers, prosecutorial misconduct and systemic racism — have been revealed.
More than 100 death-row inmates have been exonerated of their crimes after being sentenced to die, and moratoriums have been won in some states, giving confidence to a growing movement against the death penalty. But you'd never know this watching The Life of David Gale.
This movie, like others that Hollywood has made that claim to address a controversial social issue, dodges most of the controversy and instead relies on cookie-cutter formulas.
David Gale is set in Texas, the execution capital of the US. Kevin Spacey plays Dr David Gale, a philosophy professor and a leading abolitionist in the group Deathwatch. His best friend, Constance (Laura Linney), is also a leading abolitionist.
So far so good — a film that's set in the murderous state of Texas, centred around an activist organisation implacably opposed to the death penalty. But then, the plot takes an utterly preposterous turn.
Using flashbacks, we learn that middle-class, white Gale has been sentenced to death for murdering Constance. This would be laughable if it weren't so insulting — considering that it's almost always poor and black people who get the death penalty in Texas.
Gale asks to meet with a journalist, played by Kate Winslet. The plot then takes another twist — or I should say dive. The film builds up to the last 20 minutes, in which the audience learns why and how Constance died.
Readers beware: I'm about to give away the ending.
Constance and David mistakenly, and stupidly, believe that, if a prisoner is exonerated, it shows that the death penalty system really works — that it protects innocent people from being mistakenly put to death. They conclude that if they could only prove that innocent people are put to death, they could win a moratorium or abolition.
Here is where the film loses every shred of credibility. Constance, who is terminally ill with leukemia, decides to commit suicide, make it look like a murder and "frame" David, who has decided to martyr himself for the cause.
This is not only an absurd notion, but it's a slap in the face to death-row inmates, their families and anti-death-penalty activists, who have won significant gains without resorting to dumb death pacts. This movie should be retitled "The Pathetic and Wasted Life of David Gale" and boycotted.
[From Socialist Worker, newspaper of the US International Socialist Organization.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 28, 2003.
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