Capital punishment is a complicated issue. For myself it makes no sense, it turns our justice system into a revenge system, it does not work as a deterrent and, if you want to be mercenary about it, it doesn’t even make economic sense. However, I am in no doubt that should my wife be killed I would want to kill those responsible and faced with people who have been directly affected by murder I know that many of my words feel meaningless… but the issue is more complicated than that as, whilst most people have a right/wrong view, the reasoning is infinite.
Films about capital punishment are, unsurprisingly, tricky and problematic. Studios (those dastardly far-left secular progressives) run a risk of alienating half their audience and so such films tend to operate on the rather half-cocked basis of condemning capital punishment on the basis that innocents could be killed. For me the finest films about capital punishment (pure ones not the ‘execution as metaphor for war’ likes of Paths of Glory (1957) or Breaker Morant (1980) – as fine as those films are) take a guilty person and ask for their life to be saved without the moral cloak provided by failures in the system or historical distance.
COMPLETE SPOILERS AHEAD>>>
So where does The Life of David Gale sit within the genre? Well, the problem is that it doesn’t seem to sit anywhere. Gale (Kevin Spacey) is a college professor and anti- death penalty campaigner who is on death row for the rape and murder of his colleague (a brilliant Laura Linney – seriously, is this woman ever not excellent?). Kate Winslett plays Bitsey Bloom (I know), the journalist who has been assigned the final interviews and the job of moving the film along by uncovering a series of plot twists. Okay, so if you’ve seen this you know that the dead lady committed suicide and Gale framed himself to prove that an innocent man could be a victim of capital punishment and then made sure that Bitsey (yeah) got the vital video evidence too late so that he could be martyred in order to prove that… well, to prove what exactly? That capital punishment is bad because innocent people can frame themselves?
It just doesn’t make any sense at all. It tells us nothing at all. It might believe something but whatever that is has been lost amidst a need for cheap twists and, perhaps, a serious lack of conviction.
Boom Boom.
I can make this comment with complete impunity as you have already given the ending away. Early on in the when the plot is still playing the did he or didn’t he game I thought it would be really cool if he framed himself to prove the ultimate point for the campaign. Then as the film unfolds I suddenly realised that was the end we where heading for so I should have been happy as I was going to get the ending I wanted. I wasn’t! the whole thing just wasn’t very well handled and it showed its cards at the wrong time.
There are two ways of handling a twist. You either give so many clues that even the most casual observer knows what’s coming from early on or you keep everyone guessing until the reveal. This does neither and suffers for it.
Intresting, this was actually a very great read! thanks