I recognized this film as a fantasy when, early on, a beautiful female student (who more closely resembles a 30-year-old model) approaches Professor David Gale (Kevin Spacey) after class and whispers these words, "I will do anything for a grade." What he whispers back really does not matter. It is this event, we are led to believe, that starts David Gale's descent (or ascent) into martyrdom. (Another less meaningful but even more surreal moment occurs late in the film when one of the team of crack New York journalists trying to get Gale's story, or by then save his life, takes a TV set from a Huntsville,Texas, motel room; I can tell you, from personal experience, every motel TV in Huntsville is chained down.)

We are privileged to see only the last three days of David Gale's life--and only the carefully edited version that he wants us to see. Our eyes are reporter "Bitsey"Bloom (Kate Winslet), whose News magazine has paid Gale half a million dollars for three two-hour interviews (which, by the way, the prison would not be obliged to allow) and Zack, her intern/foil, who is along for the ride to show us how intense and independent Bitsey is--and also to talk out the plot as it unfolds. Knowing nothing about Gale before they are assigned to the case, they discover everything, even recreating the crime as it must have happened, within prescribed time limits.

In its use of outsiders intervening at the last minute to try to save the life of a death row inmate,"The Life of David Gale" follows the tracks of such other recent films as "Last Dance," which featured lawyer Rob Morrow trying to stop the execution of killer Sharon Stone, and "True Crime," in which reporter Clint Eastwood had one day to prevent a wrongful execution, a task performed so adroitly he also had time to take his daughter to the zoo. 

"David Gale" and these other films overlook two crucial points about executions. First, they happen at the end of a typically very long, drawn out process. Various legal impediments are battered down one by one, until the criminal runs out of options. Delays come about because lawyers are able to continue creating new impediments and finding new options to keep the appellate courts busy. Then the machinery of death grinds down these new obstacles. Today's revelation is tomorrow's dust.

This is becauseof point two: innocence doesn't matter. The U.S. Supreme Court said so in Herrera v. Collins (a Texas case) in 1993. It does not matter to the courts, or to most politicians in death penalty states, if a death row inmate is innocent; what matters is, did he get a fair trial? The conclusion can be wrong, if the procedure was right. So even if Bitsey could produce a videotape with compelling evidence that David Gale was innocent, the Texas appellate judges and politicians who would have the authority to stop his execution would have been under no obligation to intervene. Bitsey's desperate (and desperately staged) 5K run in boots to the Huntsville deathhouse would have been a waste of time, even if she had arrived days earlierand found a VCR (rather than a lethal injection machine) plugged in and waiting.

But then we would have missed all the suspense that "David Gale" works so hard to generate. This film is not really about the death penalty, in the way that a film like "Dead Man Walking" is about the death penalty. "David Gale" is a thriller, a crime story with death as the payoff. We get to watch David Gale become sleazy enough to deserve the death penalty, and then we have to figure out, through the eyes of our reporting team, what really happened. Is he the innocent man that he says he is, framed by the Texas legal system for his anti-death penalty work? Or is he the Verbal Kint of death row?

David Gale seems a highly unlikely candidate for the death penalty. A Texas philosophy professorand prominent spokesman for the abolitionist group DeathWatch, Gale's most heinous crime is that he talks such baby talk to his son that even Mr.Rogers would gag. He is brilliant and popular; everyone says so (which should be our first clue to be suspicious of him). He even debates the governor of Texas one-on-one on TV. A critical moment occurs at the end of this debate. Gale might be winning, but the governor gets the last word: "Give me the name of an innocent man who has been executed." Gale can't think of one. The governor wins the argument by default.

It is in fact impossible to declare that an innocent man has been executed, because no forum exists for making such a declaration. We can say "widely believed to be innocent," but people can believe or disbelieve what they want, after someone is put to death. Our legal system is notoriously reluctant to admit its mistakes. If someone else comes forward to confess to the crime, he can be called a liar. If witnesses recant, they are lying. Even if the DNA doesn't match, the executed person was probably still present at the crime scene and took part in the killing; the DNA just happens to belong to some other unknown person who has thus far escaped justice. The only conceivable way to prove that an innocent man has been executed is for the victim to appear alive after the execution. This has reportedly happened on occasion in the past but not within the last century, to my knowledge.

Shortly after Gale loses the debate, he loses his way in life. Falsely accused of a crime (see beautiful, crazy student above), he is disciplined and dishonored and dissipates himself with drink. He loses contact with his young son, and he wanders the streets of Austin babbling philosophical rhetoric. For someone who was so popular, he quickly moves to complete isolation and despair. How can he redeem himself? His only enduring friend, Constance Harraway (Laura Linney), who appears to be the brainy organizer of the DeathWatch group Gale fronts for, supports him to the end--her end, it turns out, for he is sent to death row for raping and suffocating her in her home.

This story is told in flashbacks punctuated by important words written on a chalkboard, like lessons that Gale is trying to teach us. Other meaningfully weird characters appear in supporting roles. Matt Craven is Dusty Wright, who we are told was once a leader of DeathWatch but now, replaced by Gale, in both the organization and Constance's life, hangs around in his pickup truck, a mute menace and obvious (always too obvious) suspect himself. Leon Rippy is Baxter Belyeu, who as Gale's incompetent counsel affects the accent of a Cajun cast into the purgatory of East Texas. Melissa McCarthy is Nico, who sells guided tours of the murder scene and recreates the victim's death pose, in the nude, for a fee. What point is this gothic horror here to make?

Of the actors playing major roles in this film, the only one who seems mostly real is Laura Linney. Her portrayal of Constance has the right edge for someone whose whole life is devoted to fighting the death penalty. We see how far she is willing to go for her cause. Gale is a pathetic whiner, more annoying than sympathetic,and certainly no poster boy for a cause. Bitsey is equally unlikable and exaggeratedly emotional, for someone who is supposed to get the story right. The cast play out their parts in this scheme as if they have been lying dormant for six years, waiting for these three days (enough time for a resurrection?) to happen. 

The writer, Charles Randolph, whom I have read is a former philosophy professor, has his death penalty facts and procedures right, for the most part (though sometimeshe seems to be running too many details at us, as if to overwhelm us with their authenticity, and it is Louisiana, not Texas, that has the highest incarceration rate in the world), but director Alan Parker's band of Austin intellectuals seems far less real than his poor Dublin soul band in "The Commitments."

At the end, what does "The Life of David Gale" have to say? That serious schemers can put one over on the legal system? I have my doubts about whether they could ever have gotten away with it. Gale, on his worst day and with the worst lawyer imaginable, was still a far better candidate for life than death. Think back to the crime and the trial, and imagine the circumstances that would have resulted in a death penalty. And then imagine that the whole crew hung together for six years, and that no one else noticed anything strange about the case until Bitsey came upon it.

Or is the point that an innocent man should not be executed, even if he sees it as his chance for martyrdom (and a big payday)? Let's not execute the innocent: the motion passes unanimously (or with an abstention or two). But what about the guilty murderers who never had a chance to outsmart the system? What punishment do they deserve in contemporary times? David Gale is too lost in his own cleverness to take on such a question.