The Life of David Gale (2003)

The Life of David Gale arrives from 2003, a moment when a studio thriller could still be assembled around two movie stars and a thesis. Alan Parker directs Kevin Spacey and Kate Winslet through a Texas death-penalty procedural that believes, sincerely and loudly, that it is saying something. What it says, eventually, is that a pair of activists would conspire to execute an innocent man in order to prove a point about executing innocent people. The film regards this as tragedy. A viewer may regard it as a logic problem.

Austin and Huntsville supply the setting, and the cast is drawn almost entirely from the white professional class. The condemned man is a philosophy professor. The activists are his colleagues. Cleo King appears in a minor supporting role and the film moves on. Capital punishment in Texas carries a racial history so thoroughly documented that ignoring it requires deliberate effort, and this film makes that effort. The women fare little better. Laura Linney's Constance and Winslet's journalist hold jobs and speak in complete sentences, but the plot turns on a fabricated rape accusation, then on a woman's self-immolating sacrifice arranged by the men around her. That is not a thesis. It is a device.

The sermonizing is both engine and flaw. Critics in 2003 described being bludgeoned, and the intervening years have not softened the blow. Roger Ebert gave it zero stars and argued that it accidentally made the case for the other side, which remains the most interesting thing anyone has written about it. The cause here is an older liberal one, abolition of the death penalty, not a newer cultural program, and the film carries no other social freight. It lectures at length, with perfect seriousness, and then it stops.