Monday, March 3, 2003

THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE, PT II: Thanks to my earlier post on this apparently dreadful film, a number of people have been coming to this website looking for spoilers to the allegedly atrocious ending.

Today, thanks to Slate's David Edelstein, I'm happy to oblige. Here's how the story ends (highlight area to reveal):
[SPOILER]There is really no way to address the larger insanity of The Life of David Gale without giving away the surprise ending—a surprise only by virtue of its idiocy. Fair warning? Here goes: The nerdy professor (Laura Linney) was dying of leukemia anyway, so she and the Cowboy and David Gale rigged her kinky rape and murder to make Gale into a death-penalty martyr. When the truth is revealed to her, Bitsy does not say, "What a bunch of fruitcakes." Her eyes fill with tears at the noble logic of it all.[/SPOILER]

Yikes. That's bad. Edelstein's full review is available here, including this further trashing of director Alan Parker:
Parker has been responsible for some of the worst cinematic battering-rams of our time: After Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), which belongs in some special circle of hell, I can think of no more contemptible piece of filmmaking than Parker's self-proclaimed tribute to the Civil Rights movement, Mississippi Burning (1988). Forget — if you can — that the African-Americans were pushed off to the sidelines to make way for the white FBI heroes. The more philosophical outrage was that Parker took the most successful non-violent resistance movement since Gandhi and made it fodder for a vigilante movie — a coarse, thumping melodrama about the ways in which noble ends justify barbaric means.

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