COMPROMISES.("The Life of David Gale"; "Daredevil")(Movie Review)

"The Life of David Gale" is one of those hyper-articulate messes which inspire awe and a kind of nauseated pity. This is no ordinary cock-up: this is a remarkably talented cock-up, made with wit and feeling and featuring a classic performance by a great actress, Laura Linney. But all the lovely acting and the high intelligence (a former philosophy professor named Charles Randolph wrote the script) have been poured into a stupid story that relies on the rusted mechanics of a routine thriller. The movie is plotted against the clock: David Gale (Kevin Spacey), a philosophy professor at the University of Austin and an anti-death-penalty advocate, has been convicted of murder. After sitting on death row for six years, Gale is about to be executed--in four days--and only the ace investigative reporter Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet) can save him. Alan Parker, who has made both good movies ("Shoot the Moon," "Birdy") and terrible ones ("The Road to Wellville," "Evita"), apparently knows no shame, because he gives us such jaw droppers as a rented car that overheats and stalls like a cranky burro just as Bitsey is rushing to prevent the execution. Holding the exculpatory evidence in her hands, Winslet then runs through the entire state of Texas--down roads, through towns, even across a graveyard planted with more white crosses than Flanders Field. She runs for Kevin Spacey's life.

We all know why such feeble stuff is there. It's what allows a major American studio (Universal) to persuade itself to finance a movie with a literate script. But, once you rely on such devices, you halfway kill the script and generally discredit the movie in the eyes of the audience it seems aimed at--an audience that could follow the academic references, the legal arguments, the moral sentiments so casually tossed off by the characters. The picture is practically an ad for the dysfunctions of the current system of making movies.

Bitsey Bloom is meant to be a kind of virtuous opportunist--a tough news-magazine journalist with a good heart. The character has integrity (she's gone to jail for her beliefs), but Winslet, in a classic mistake, plays the role as if the slightest display of charm would compromise Bitsey's strength. Winslet is strenuous and beautiful, with a noble Victorian brow and a sharply cut mouth. Her eyes blazing, she has a startling vividness. But Winslet's anger is joined to a fatal lack of humor, and if she doesn't lighten up she could degenerate into the educated person's Demi Moore. The indomitable Bitsey heads out from her magazine's Park Avenue headquarters and pays Gale a half-million-dollar fee for a three-day interview leading up to the execution. Morose and wrathful, he was convicted of raping and murdering his close friend and colleague Constance Harraway (Laura Linney), a fellow-professor and anti-death-penalty activist. Did he really commit the crime? Or was he set up by right-wingers who wanted to destroy him?

As Gale tells his story to Bitsey, we get to see his earlier life, and some of the college-scene banter is fun. Gale, wearing denim, delivers a racy lecture on Jacques Lacan's theories of fantasy, and one of Gale's colleagues talks of using a "hermeneutical bias" to interpret Gale's collapsing marriage. The phrase may panic the malls ("Herman who?"), but the movie makes it abundantly clear what's happening to Gale. He hits the bottle, and recites naughty limericks at an uproarious student-teacher party. He's meant to be a good man without discipline--a serious thinker and crusader who can't, or won't, pull himself together. Glassy-eyed, unshaven, his posture slack, Spacey goes all the way into his recent obsession with weak, stumbling characters. Here and there, he flounders so badly that one has to restrain a Maggie Thatcher impulse to shake him by the shoulders--"Buck up a bit, fellow!"--but it's a relief to see an American hero who is far from perfect. Spacey delivers bitterly intelligent, alcoholic lines as if he knew what they meant.

And Laura Linney lifts him out of the depths. Linney was amazing two ...