This is the question raised by The Life of David Gale (starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet and Laura Linney, and directed by Alan Parker). It’s not everyday that we get to see a movie so touching yet disturbing as it is life-altering. The movie opens our minds to the true meaning of the word "commitment."
The film opens with Bitsey Bloom (Winslet) running desperately with a videotape in her hand after her rented car has broken down. Bloom is a magazine reporter personally chosen by a former Harvard philosophy professor who has been convicted of rape and murder, David Gale (Spacey), for an exclusive interview. Their sessions are scheduled for two hours daily for three days before Gale’s scheduled execution. Bloom says he chose Gale for her integrity as a reporter. He knows she respects his off-the-record accounts which Bloom swears by.
Gale is famous not only for being a good teacher but also for being a co-director of a human rights movement against death penalty. Together with his co-activist Constance Harraway (Linney), he has become controversial for his debates with the Texas governor, an advocate of the death penalty, and for a sensational rape case filed (and later dropped) against Gale by a former graduate student, Berlin. Gale’s much-respected yet controversial life had gone down the drain after the rape case. His wife had left him with their son for Madrid. Harvard had stripped him of his job and he became an alcoholic.
As Gale tries desperately to mend the pieces of his broken life to win custody of his son, Constance is raped and murdered in her own house. All the evidence points to Gale as the culprit. He is tried and sentenced to death.
This is when he seeks the help of Bitsey Bloom who lives up to her interviewee’s expectations and eventually finds herself investigating the case. On the second day of her interview with Gale, somebody breaks in her motel room and leaves clues to the puzzle she’s piecing together. In her room are a packing tape – used to seal the plastic bag on Constance’s head which caused her suffocation – and a videotape of how she struggled for her life. The next day proves to be more enlightening as Gale recounts to Bloom how a crucial piece of evidence came to be.
Throughout Bloom’s trips to jail and around Texas with a magazine intern, she is followed by Cassidy, a cowboy and an activist in the anti-death penalty movement. Blooms logic points to Cassidy as Constance’s killer. However, Bloom’s curiosity leads her to another path.
During her final interview with Gale, Bloom swears to him that she will clear his name in his son’s memory. Bloom studies the tape she has received and finds herself reenacting Constance’s death right in the crime scene. Her investigative instinct leads her to Cassidy’s shack where she discovers the truth 15 minutes before Gale’s execution. She tries desperately to get to the state prison to save an innocent man but despite her best efforts, her rented car fails her and this brings the audience back to the opening scene.
Bloom runs despondently with the truth in her hand. She is too late; Gale is executed. He becomes a victim of the very system he is fighting against.
Bloom exposes the truth. She and her editors post the video in the magazine’s website which catches the attention of lawmakers. The police seek Cassidy and raid his shack but don’t find him. Meanwhile, Cassidy anonymously delivers a large amount of money to Gale’s wife in Madrid together with the postcard from Berlin (Gale’s former student), which the latter had sent to her professor telling him how sorry she was.
Suggesting to viewers that the movie ends here, the film unravels another mystery as Bloom receives a package containing her "key to freedom," a tape labeled "off the record." She views the tape which proves to be disturbing. Gale had known Bloom will not break her promise. And Bloom knows it is "off the record."
I, myself, had a fair share of activism back in college – lying on the main gate of our university campus in Los Baños, traveling back and forth from one end of Metro Manila to another to join rallies and protest against tuition fee increase in the state university, brushing elbows with people who are now either six feet under or up there in the mountains living the life of fugitives. I must admit, I was disillusioned by this activism or perhaps I just didn’t have the commitment that Gale and Constance had.
Movies either mirror society or suggest how we must behave. David Gale may be an exaggerated portrayal of a man so committed to his ideals, he’ll sacrifice his own life to free the eyes of justice from its blindfold. This movie makes us rethink how far we can and should go to uphold the values of our idealism.
Do you really believe in what you’re fighting for? Or do you just love the limelight?