Sometimes ripped-from-the-headlines entertainment just can’t keep up with the headlines.
“The Life of David Gale,” for instance, is Alan Parker’s hot-button movie about an anti-death penalty activist, played by Kevin Spacey, who — here comes the whomping irony — winds up on Death Row for murder. Spacey and Laura Linney, who plays a fellow activist-turned-murder victim, traveled to Chicago last month for a screening, and their timing was serendipitous.
Two days earlier Gov. George Ryan had proclaimed blanket clemency for all members of Illinois’ Death Row. Now an audience of Chicagoans was watching a thriller in which characters go to absurd extremes to demonstrate the mere possibility that the capital punishment system is so flawed that it could result in the death of an innocent.
Watching the film, you wanted to shout at the screen, “Hey, people, haven’t you been following the news?”
For what it’s worth, this Texas-set movie was filmed in 2001, and Linney’s character does make passing reference to Illinois’ moratorium on executions. But “The Life of David Gale,” as well as novels such as Scott Turow’s new death-penalty-oriented “Reversible Errors,” demonstrates the pitfalls of tying a story to such a volatile topic.
At the post-“David Gale” Q&A at the 600 N. Michigan theater, the audience certainly was in more of a mood to talk politics than aesthetics. Questioner after questioner asked the stars their opinions about the death penalty.
Spacey demurred, saying of the movie, “I don’t think it’s trying to be a spokesperson on the issue.”
Linney was more revealing of her liberal leanings but stressed, “Our views on the death penalty really have nothing to do with the movie.”
For his part, Turow, whose novel focuses on a lawyer handling a Death Row inmate’s appeal, said he has been questioned almost exclusively about his feelings on the death penalty rather than the story.
“I’ve sort of gotten caught up in having the issue overwhelm the book,” said Turow, an attorney on the state’s Commission on Capital Punishment. “Every once in a while people actually read the book and say, `This is more of a love story than a novel about the death penalty.’ It’s not as if I’m unwilling to talk about the death penalty. It’s an important issue, and it’s consumed a lot of my life.”
In an interview the day after the screening, Spacey held to his belief that “David Gale” doesn’t function primarily as a political statement. “When I saw the film, I was excited because I felt it didn’t operate on a sort of a holding-a-placard-up-and-marching-the-issue-out [basis] but that it worked as a thriller,” he said. “So I’ve been a little surprised at the seriousness with which people talk about the issues in the movie.”
Chicago was the second stop, after Atlanta, on Spacey and Linney’s promotional tour. They had also shown “David Gale” to University of Chicago students that afternoon.
“Clearly in this particular town and in this particular state at this moment, it’s on the forefront of everybody’s minds, so I understand it here,” Spacey said, “but even in Atlanta, people were really serious about the questions. And so I hope that the issue won’t outweigh the entertainment value I think that the film offers for the audience.”
Linney, in a separate interview, said she also was surprised by the viewers’ reactions. “I’ve never been in a movie set in a political context, that has a political issue that’s such a hot one, so everybody wants to know my political views,” she said. “So it’s interesting. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to talk about that because I don’t want it to distract from the movie itself, and then there’s another part of me that thinks, `Oh, you know, so what? This is just what I think, that I’m just who I am.'”
Was it coincidence?
As for whether the movie’s convergence with real-life events will help or hurt its reception, Linney wasn’t sure. “I think it just is what it is,” she said. “But it, certainly, clearly is on people’s minds. It’s not a coincidence that Gov. Ryan did what he did and this movie is coming out at the same time, because clearly it’s an issue that’s constantly being debated. And it’s an emotional issue, so people feel very, very strongly about it one way or the other.”
By addressing a political issue at all, “David Gale” is bucking a trend among major-studio releases. As the cost of making and marketing movies has skyrocketed, Hollywood has been less and less inclined to risk offending anyone by flirting with controversy.
Audiences, meanwhile, have shown little inclination to embrace issue-oriented films. They stayed far away from “Bloody Sunday,” about Northern Ireland violence, despite its being one of last year’s best-reviewed films, and although “Black Hawk Down” was a hit, the movie emphasized pyrotechnics over the policy-making aspects of U.S. involvement in Somalia.
Influencing public perception
At the same time, politically oriented films, when they work, can influence public perceptions. Rob Warden, executive director of Northwestern University’s Center for Wrongful Convictions, cited the 1958 Susan Hayward melodrama “I Want To Live!” as a movie that had “a tremendous impact” on people’s opposition to the death penalty, which would peak in the late 1960s.
More recent films have been a mixed bag, added Warden, who has yet to see “David Gale.” Of the Clint Eastwood thriller “True Crime,” he said, “You look at something like that, where he saves the guy at the last minute, and it’s so unrealistic that it has no credibility and contributes nothing. But then if you look at something like `The Green Mile,’ which is totally preposterous, but at least it portrays the humanity and the reality of Death Row in some sense, and that’s very useful.”
Turow, who also hasn’t seen “David Gale,” agreed that movies and books “can increase the dialogue” but only when their agendas aren’t too blatant.
“Generally speaking I’m suspicious of art that attempts to take sides,” Turow said. “I think what makes narrative work is a sense of complexity and ambiguity. If you want to talk about something that was great art about the death penalty, that was `Dead Man Walking,’ which made no effort to hide how depraved the crime and criminal were but still maintained its point of view.”
Yet at the same time, Turow added, “you can look at plays like `The Exonerated.’ It’s definitely didactic and dogmatic, but it’s very moving.” In fact, before making his clemency decision, Gov. Ryan saw this play, based on the experiences of wrongly accused Death Row inmates, and said it “just shows you what’s wrong with the system.”
Parker certainly makes no effort to hide his anti-death penalty feelings, either on screen or in a lengthy essay in the “David Gale” press kit titled “The Death Penalty: The Political Argument.” “[W]e have no right to so readily take the lives of other human beings,” the British director writes, saying his movie is “a story about people who would go to great extremes because of their beliefs, and to that end the film is biased on their behalf.”
`Demonizing’ supporters
A few Q&A participants at the 600 N. Michigan screening, including a young man who told the actors of a family member’s murder, complained that the movie “demonizes” death penalty supporters. Though this apparently isn’t Parker’s intent, an equally persuasive case could be made that the movie demonizes the death penalty opponents by portraying them as fanatics who need to manipulate the system to make their point.
Likewise, some early reviews have criticized Parker for manipulating the audience by using credulity-stretching plot twists to make serious points. The movie’s pivotal scene, at least thematically, comes as Spacey’s title character draws a blank during a televised debate with Texas’ preppie, pro-death penalty governor (portrayed like a smoother George W. Bush) when asked to name one innocent person put to death under the system.
“I wish I could have sat in on that debate because I would have had something to say,” Warden said, citing Texas’ Gary Graham, executed in 2000 despite eyewitness accounts that he was not present at the murder, as just one person who probably would have fill the bill.
The bottom line for Linney is although “David Gale” is her most political film, the distinction is a matter of degree. “Art at its basis is a political thing most of the time,” she said. “It’s showing people how a group of people live and how a group of people deal with each other and how groups of people treat each other, and that then turns into politics. That’s basically the root of politics, I think.”
