The Life of David Gale (15) <br></br>Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (15)

Curtains for Kate

Alan Parker's death-penalty drama The Life of David Gale manages to be both proudly high-minded and fantastically stupid. The script, a first-time effort by former philosophy professor Charles Randolph, offers a desultory debate on the morality of capital punishment but chooses to couch it inside a thriller of monumental tackiness and titillation. Parker has been down this road before, mixing piety and cheap thrills in his civil-rights movie Mississippi Burning (1989), so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised; all the same, my jaw hit the floor a few times in the course of his latest. Here is a master vulgarian at work.

The plot is a desperate-race-against-the-clock job. David Gale (Kevin Spacey) is a philosophy professor and death-penalty abolitionist who, in an irony only the movies would dare, has been convicted of murder and now, after six years on death row, is about to be executed. With four days left, he summons for interview a tough-as-nails investigative journalist, Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), who he hopes will dig out the truth and prove his innocence.

The movie actually begins with Winslet racing across Texas farmland holding the vital piece of evidence that may exonerate Gale at the 11th hour. Will she make it in time? It's the kind of melodramatic scramble I thought Robert Altman had finally killed off with that mini-parody in The Player, when Bruce rescues Julia from the gas chamber as the vapours lick around her. "Sorry, honey – traffic was a bitch," says Bruce. In The Life of David Gale it's a car breaking down that necessitates Winslet's mercy dash, only here we're not meant to hoot with laughter.

As Gale recounts his story to Bitsey, the film flashes back to his travails as a college prof, which include a crumbling marriage, an unproven rape charge and his eventual surrender to booze. In short, it's another instalment of Spacey Agonistes, the same tearful, troubled guy he played in Pay It Forward, K-Pax, The Shipping News – he wants us to cry along with him, but all I felt was the urge to give him a good slap. Please, can somebody rescue this man from himself? Winslet is also hard to watch, having plainly made a decision that her ambitious Bitsey Bloom should not be the sort of woman to crack a smile: that's tricky, especially if you have a name that sounds like you're a runaway from a Preston Sturges movie. No way around it: this is an epically humourless performance.

Thank God, then, for the one actor who's minding the shop. Laura Linney, stupendous in You Can Count On Me a couple of years ago, plays Constance, an earnest fellow professor and abolitionist who keeps trying to raise Gale from his slough – even though she herself is dying of leukemia. Linney is made to look frumpy and bothered, yet her cheerfulness keeps breaking through the script's dourness, or rather it does until Parker subjects her to a grotesque murder by suffocation, caught on grainy video for the full exploitation effect. This kind of tastelessness grows on the movie like mold. Parker just can't resist underlining a point, linking scenes with whippy montages of single words ("rape", "pain", "suffering" etc) and plastering a crude guitar soundtrack over the top.

The effect is similar at the movie's climax, where the editing rapidly crosscuts between details of the prisoner's last meal, enumeration of the lethal chemicals that the prison authorities administer, and the scenes of protest from the pro-life lobbies. In the press notes Parker avows that he's "very much against" the death penalty, but that conviction could not be divined from watching his film. The twist ending actually muddles any coherent point of view, and, in cheapening death, makes the enemies of capital punishment look as cynical as its supporters. If Parker had stepped back to consider for a moment, he might have twigged the damage he was inflicting on his case by this stunt plotting device, but then as a film-maker he has usually preferred something provocative to something truthful. That's how this film has ended up splashy, overemphatic and knuckle-headed.

In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman doesn't repeat the trick of his recent Adaptation and insert himself into the narrative, although the film wouldn't be that much weirder if he did. It's based on the memoir by Chuck Barris, who produced and hosted prototype TV trash such as The Dating Game and The Gong Show, and is now regarded as a key figure in the dumbing-down of America. But that's not the half of it. According to Barris (Sam Rockwell), he also moonlighted as a hitman for the CIA, clocking up 33 kills around the globe and making the world safe from the Reds: "Call it patriotism," says the recruiting agent played by George Clooney, one of few men who can wear a large grey moustache with style.

Clooney also directs, and for a debut hasn't done a bad job, though one wonders how resonant a chord the name Chuck Barris will strike in the British consciousness. (Now a movie that revealed Bob Monkhouse to be an MI6 assassin – that would fly.) The film styles itself as "a cautionary tale", but I'm not sure precisely what it's cautioning against. Putting crap on television? Or killing people? It seems undecided as to which is the greater crime. In Rockwell's wired impersonation, Barris is part-tortured soul, part-happy idiot, but mostly a schmuck who keeps betraying his girlfriend (Drew Barrymore). "Asshole," hisses one woman. "I know, I know," he replies. He's not unlike Greg Kinnear as Bob Crane in Auto Focus, another smiling TV lightweight who has no real sense of himself and fills the void with sex. Barris doesn't meet Crane's grisly fate, despite the attempts of a latter-day Mata Hari, played by Julia Roberts, to bump him off. It's perhaps a measure of our involvement in this quirky but inconsequential film that it would be no great tragedy if she succeeded.