My wife borrowed Alan Parker’s film “The Life of David Gale” from her University library because she knows I like thrillers. She’d never heard of it, while I seemed vaguely to recall its capital punishment theme. We sat down and watched it late last night. Both of us enjoyed it.
This morning I started reading the reviews. First up, as is my habit, was Roger Ebert. He’s a critic whose style I like and whose opinions I often share. We often assign films similar ratings.
But not for this one. That Roger gave it NO STARS, while this Roger gave it 3 stars. Good thriller, if one with a number of implausibilities, and very interesting study of a man falling apart. As someone with a young kid, I could empathise with the Spacey character’s situation.
Anyway, after watching it, my wife and I briefly discussed it. She made the point (as she is wont to) about westerners (she’s Chinese herself, though educated at universities in England) loving their causes, whether abortion, or animal rights, or, as in this film, capital punishment. We both felt that the way in which the film grounded the activists’ fight against the death penalty against a background of their own weaknesses and insecurities and failures was interesting and ultimately realistic.
As it happens, I’m in favour of the death penalty (broadly speaking) while my wife doesn’t have strong views either way.
I mention that because - and here we come to the heart of the point I want to make, and which relates most directly to my sensational title (how else could I get anyone to read about a film that was discussed here when it came out two years ago?) - reading the negative comments on the film led me to think that most of those who hated the film (as in giving it NO STARS) hated it because they took it to be so negative about anti CP campaigners.
They hated the way the film made those campaigners look like total losers. (Is that not almost the worse insult that can be directed against an American?) Their office was shabby, their campaign was amateurish, their PR was crap, and they were driven more by their personal demons than by their desire to see justice done and rights upheld.
They took the film as a slur against themselves, their raison d’etre, a pointed reminder that the causes with which they surround themselves are built on a foundation of sand. That they were either losers or phoneys. That if it wasn’t the death penalty they were campaigning against, it might equally have been whaling or shark’s fin soup. Or even, as the film forces the viewer to recognise (consciously or unconsciously), that it could just have easily have been the death penalty that they were campaigning for. (The crowd scene, where the two opposing camps come closer together and eventually merge outside the prison where the execution takes place, hints at this powerfully.)
Good film-making is meant to be neither comfortable nor unambiguous. This film (made of course by people - unlike me - who oppose the DP) succeeds in making the viewer think.
Unless, of course, he or she is convinced of the certainty of the path they have taken and wish only to have that worldview confirmed by those around them.
Bush and Rove?
Not always. Could just as easily be Berkeley man and Manhattan woman.