제이징크스의 상상로그 :: The Life Of David Gale

from composition/I think or sense 2008/04/28 15:44

David Gale is a man who has tried to live by his principles, but in a bizarre twist of fate this devoted father, popular professor and respected death penalty opponent finds himself on Death Row for the rape and murder of fellow activist Constance Hallaway. With only three days before his scheduled execution, Gale agrees to give Pulitzer-hungry reporter Elizabeth Bitsey Bloom the exclusive interview she has been chasing. But Bitsey soon realises that this assignment is more than she bargained for, and that a man's life is in her hands. Putting her own safety in jeopardy, she frantically races to piece together the shocking events surrounding Constance's death, before it's too late.

Kevin Spacey now seems determined to make the move from jaunty, caustic leading man to martyr: he sacrificed himself for the betterment of mankind, though not necessarily the moviegoing public, in ''K-Pax'' and ''Pay It Forward.'' And now, in the would-be thriller ''The Life of David Gale,'' he plays a death-penalty opponent facing execution for murder. The film's ironies must have made him delirious.

It's understandable that Mr. Spacey doesn't want to be typecast, and his ability to curdle the sentimentality in the sappiest material has almost saved sections of those previous movies. But this is an enterprise in which everyone is out to make History, instead of a movie.

As the title character in ''David Gale,'' Mr. Spacey, a downtrodden philosophy professor and activist who's become an alcoholic criminal, evinces a weariness in his voice. The words float out of his mouth as if he were too tired to muster the strength for a single inflection, and this gives the picture the merest trace of believability. But that's before the crude, bullying narrative begins peppering the audience with kidney punches: ''David Gale'' may be the first liberal-leaning movie that could be brought up on assault charges since its director, Alan Parker, made ''Midnight Express.'' Mr. Parker seems to think audiences are incapable of coming to their own conclusions, so he relieves them of that burden by doing it for them.

Unfortunately, the contrivances pile up, too—there's a revelation of cancer and other red herrings that will leave the audience stunned, and not by the film's cleverness. There hasn't been a better time for a movie that asks Americans to think about life-and-death questions than after a weekend in which hundreds of thousands of protesters marched to make their feelings known about a possible war with Iraq. There's a hunger for another side of a national dialogue; in Gale's face-to-face debate with the governor, he's such a savvy, articulate customer that those who agree with the picture's politics will thrill to Mr. Spacey's elegant volubility.

But Gale undercuts his own argument because of ego—a weakness that underlies this movie, which doesn't build its case as meticulously as ''The China Syndrome.'' ''David Gale'' tries to show it has its heart in the right place, but it's such a crude undertaking that it doesn't actually seem to have a heart at all.

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F0CE1D7153DF932A15751C0A9659C8B63