THE
LIFE OF DAVID GALE PLEADS FOR ABOLITION OF THE DEATH PENALTY
How far will a person go to express commitment to a cause?
Soldiers die in battle for their country. Socrates drank
the hemlock to protest thought control. In The Life
of David Gale, an opponent of the death penalty, David Gale (played
by Kevin Spacey), is on death row, with only a few days before
his execution. He has summoned Elizabeth "Bitsey" Bloom
(played by Kate Winslet), a journalist who served seven days
in prison because she refused to disclose her sources for
a news story, to hear what he has to say. As the story unfolds,
Bitsey changes from skepticism to intense involvement with
an apparently innocent victim of the death penalty. Gale
was a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas,
and we see him lecturing about Jacques Lacan's conundrum
of the inability of a desired fantasy to be satisfying once
achieved. When he finishes his lecture, and all students
but one have left the classroom, Berlin (played by Rhona
Mitra) offers to do "anything" to get a good grade,
but Gale turns her down. When he leaves the classroom, he
is joined by Constance Hallaway (played by Laura Linney),
who updates him on developments surrounding the latest Texas
death row inmate, a seventeen-year-old African American girl
only a few days away from her execution. At a campus party,
where Gale gets plastered, Berlin corners him and directs
him in a sex act that leaves possible evidence of rape. Soon,
he is arrested for rape, his wife walks out on him taking
his son, though he is exonerated, presumably because the
he-said she-said trial leaves reasonable doubt about his
guilt. Nevertheless, the university fires him, the national
headquarters of Deathwatch bans him from the Austin office,
he drinks heavily, yet he continues to socialize with Constance.
One day, Constance is found dead, Gale is arrested, and he
is convicted and sentenced to death. On returning to her
motel one night, Bitsey finds a mysterious videotape; when
she plays the tape, she concludes that Constance committed
suicide and was not murdered, but she obtains evidence too
late to stop Gale's execution. At this point, the plot takes
twists and turns, leaving some filmviewers confused, but
they will not be in the dark about the real purpose of the
film--to abolish the death penalty. Despite approval of the
death penalty by 66 percent of the American people in public
opinion polls, The Life of David Gale provides ample arguments,
even religious arguments, to oppose a penalty that leaves
the United States alone among the world's democracies. Alan
Parker, who has received Political Film Society awards for
his Midnight Express (1978) and Mississippi
Burning (1988)
and a nomination for Come See the Paradise (1991), receives
another nomination for directing The Life of David
Gale as
best film of 2003 in raising consciousness about the need
to advance human rights. MH
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