The Death Row Syndrome

David Appleby/Universal Studios

Kevin Spacey stars as a professor on death row in "The Life of David Gale," directed by Alan Parker.

By ELVIS MITCHELL

 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.

 The reporter Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), from a newsmagazine called News (apparently, there were no tie-ins available from Time, Newsweek or Scholastic Scope), has been granted three final interview sessions with Gale while he sits on death row in Texas. He is convicted of having raped and killed Constance (Laura Linney), his activist associate. Ms. Winslet is not asked to act � she simply assumes poses, the better to be shaken out of them. Tough and bitter, Bitsey is eventually won over by her subject. As she hears more about the events that led to Gale's sentencing, her acrid demeanor dissolves like sugar in summer rain.

 Her equally intrepid intern, the puppyish Zack (Gabriel Mann), already believes something is fishy � he points out that Gale's lawyer is incompetent and other obvious facts. Neither of them, however, appears to be in a position to judge anyone's competence, given that this intrepid pair are incapable of even returning a faulty rental car. The picture begins with Bitsey running with a crucial videotape in hand after the rented Ford overheats. The story then unfolds in flashback. As the reporters dig further, it looks as if Gale was more than railroaded: he was given a first-class seat on the bullet train.

 Mr. Spacey's stylized brooding, with its swoops and dives, makes him an apt choice for a man riddled by mood swings. He works hard to make Gale register as a character � no small feat, given the facile script and the relentless sourness of the filmmaking. Yet there's nothing facile about parts of his performance. (That is, until the ludicrously predictable, tear-jerking climax, a cheat that implies that Gale is all talk: he comes off as the Keyser Soze of liberals.)

 Mr. Spacey may have taken his lead from his idol, Jack Lemmon, who made politics part of his role in the anti-nuclear-power film "The China Syndrome." Like "David Gale," "Syndrome" benefited from a flow of events that made it wholly appropriate and timely. For "Syndrome," it was the Three Mile Island accident. But Lemmon gave one of his most memorable performances in "Syndrome," a terse, decisive plum � one of his rare latter-day dramatic roles in which he wasn't stewing in his own pained sweat.

 Mr. Parker, on the other hand, lets loose the floodgates for "David Gale," which opens nationwide today. The man who scaled back with "The Commitments" and brought flesh and blood to "Evita" has reverted to the bludgeoning technique that made many of his early movies unforgettable � in the manner of a carjacking.

 Mr. Parker is apparently out to make us look back fondly on the halcyon days of filmed brutality as in "Midnight Express" � the first of his films to beat down audiences with a crowbar � and in the insulting "Mississippi Burning." "Burning" single-handedly took the civil rights movement away from Rosa Parks, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other courageous civilians who risked their lives, and credited social change to the F.B.I.