BEYOND THE SEA
DIRECTED BY KEVIN SPACEY
THE SEA INSIDE
DIRECTED BY ALEJANDRO AMENáBAR
ANYBODY WHO SAYS "performing is my life" has no life. Filmmakers who ignore this fact risk cursing the world with another Beyond the Sea, a disaster from which director-producer-cowriter-star Kevin Spacey will be lucky to escape.
It's long been Spacey's dream to make a biographical film about Bobby Darin, the Queens kid with a fever-damaged heart who was told he wouldn't live to age 15, yet became a nightclub star, recording artist, film actor, Rat Pack friend and husband of Sandra Dee (played here by Kate Bosworth). Now that Spacey's dream has come true, viewers have the chance to see a two-hour film with little film sense, about a phenomenally selfish entertainer who was a prick to pretty much everyone, played by an actor who's 15 years too old for the part and who insists on doing all his own singing and dancing even though he's not very good. To quote Dallas Observer columnist Robert Wilonsky's observation about Vanilla Ice during his ganja-and-dredlocks phase, "The kid's got balls of steel. Too bad they're rolling around in his head."
Darin was a graceful dancer, and his singing boasted spot-on rhythm and an easy mastery of phrasing and pitch; Spacey dances like Pee-Wee Herman on a hot plate, and his off-pitch, rhythm-free singing is so lackluster that if he wasn't playing Darin and singing Darin's hits, you would never be able to guess whom he was imitating. And yet, movie star ass-kissing being what it is, we're forced to endure scene after scene where Spacey mangles Darin's hits only to be applauded by shrieking girls—and in one case, by a studio full of professional musicians.
You know Spacey was counseled against doing this, because the very first scene—set during the filming of a theoretical Darin biopic—has Darin, who died at 37, being excoriated for daring to play himself. "He's too old to play the part," a naysayer observes. "I was born to play this part and you damn well know it," Darin snaps, so bitterly that Spacey's roadkill toupee and creepy prosthetic makeup threaten to pop off his head. In the context of Spacey's egocentric gambit, some of Darin's dialogue sounds like a star justifying his career choices. Defending his hairpiece, Darin declares, "Sinatra wears one." Yeah, but Sinatra's looked like it was made of real hair, and he didn't try to play 20 years younger than he was. Spacey-as-Darin is simply too theatrical—too artificial—to be believed. In broad daylight, he looks like a wax statue of Mike Wallace that's begun to melt.
We sprint through his childhood with his supportive mom (Brenda Blethyn), sister (Caroline Aaron) and brother-in-law (Bob Hoskins) and watch him overcome illness and achieve his dream of playing the Copacabana. Boilerplate docudrama scenes give way to musical setpieces, but except for the dance number that celebrates Darin leaving his neighborhood, and a couple of Stanley Donen-worthy crane shots, the musical numbers show no evidence of intelligent design. Beyond the Sea plays like a standard-issue HBO biopic of a screwed-up artist. The career highlights fall where they should (the film's last act finds Darin reinventing himself as a hippie folkie and RFK booster) and you never doubt where you are in time because the movie keeps cuing you with tv news footage. Some good performers drown beneath Spacey's waves of mediocrity: Aaron, Hoskins, John Goodman as Darin's manager and Bosworth as Dee, who's clearly so much younger than Spacey that the Darin-Dee marriage sometimes plays like a May-September romance. (Greta Scacchi has a few witty moments as Dee's mom, a faded flower who thinks she's still entitled to trap a bee.)
From Ray through Alexander and The Aviator, biopics tend to be more traditional than radical, but if the central performer is well-cast and imaginative and the character is colorful and multilayered, they can still hold your attention. Beyond the Sea lacks the latter qualities and never stops suffering as a result. Because Spacey is so arrogantly miscast, and because Darin seems to have no personality and few personal beliefs not related to showbiz, Darin's childhood-rooted desire to succeed is the film's only unifying force, and it's just not enough. Spacey and Lewis Colick's script could have been written by a 17-year-old fan of Dennis Potter; it's full of Brechtian distancing devices, but they're presented so clumsily that they make us aware that we're watching not just a movie, but a bad movie. When the elder Darin talks to his younger self, played by William Ullrich, I kept wishing the kid would break character and say, "You know this isn't working, right?"
The Sea Inside, on the other hand, works. It works so well that I wished it were more adventurous. Cowritten, directed, edited and scored by Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar—who directed 2001's The Others and 1997's Abre Los Ojos, the basis for Vanilla Sky—the film tells of Ramon Sampedro (Javier Bardem), a Galician who was rendered quadriplegic in a diving accident and fought for nearly 30 years to get the Spanish government to legalize euthanasia. If you think it sounds like an inspirational, laughing-through-the-tears movie, you're right. Ramon explains, "When you can't escape and you learn to depend entirely upon others, you learn to cry with a smile."
Amenábar's work is catnip to Hollywood because he has a Hollywood sensibility. His movies seem gritty and poetic on first glance, but they're not as sensuous or complex as they seem; they're glossy and emphatic, they flatter movie stars like royalty and they remind you periodically who to root for and what to think. Amenábar tells this story mostly in close-ups, like a tv movie; granted, this might be a tactical move designed to get the most out of the film's dream sequences, which include a flying scene and a seduction scene. Even so, it's a mistake. The fantasy scenes are so controlled and powerful (particularly the flying dream, which starts with a steely-eyed Ramon climbing out of bed and staring down the hallway at an open window) that they make the rest of the movie seem pedestrian.
This might have been a transcendent subjective biography if the filmmaker had been willing to get inside Ramon's head more often. Instead, it's intelligent but too clean, restrained and exact—essentially a star vehicle for a great actor, and a biography of a bitter, suicidal quadriplegic shaped as a tribute to the human spirit so you'll walk out feeling good about the world.
Respect is due to the film's real-life inspirations, but the movie's fictional versions seem too schematic: the wise, tragic hero; the lawyer and love interest (sad-eyed, gorgeous Belén Rueda) with secret health problems of her own; a local DJ (Lola Duenas) who develops a mostly unrequited crush on Ramon. Luckily, Ramon is certainly worth having a crush on. He may be bedridden, bald and physically contorted, but as played by Bardem—a thick-shouldered actor who's shaping up as Spain's belated answer to Brando—he's magnetic, a wise but human-scaled life force.
Like Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, Bardem does all he can to de-maudlinize the script; he plays up Ramon's frustration and sense of intellectual superiority whenever possible. ("You haven't kissed a girl in 20 years?" his attorney asks hopefully. "Spare me the demonstration," Ramon mutters.) And while Ramon's sexuality is largely theoretical, Bardem makes him sexy anyway. When he looks at some of the movie's women, you just know he's trying to picture them naked.
As a message picture, The Sea Inside succeeds. It's a filmed piece of theater with some stirring cinematic passages and the decency to fully engage the political and religious issues raised by Ramon's desire to end his life. The movie's strongest section pits Ramon against a quadriplegic priest who has strong moral objections to Ramon's pursuit of legalized suicide. Amenábar stages their confrontation as a comedy setpiece, with the priest's visiting Ramon's house to debate him. The priest's assistant runs up to Ramon's room to deliver a message, then runs down again to relay Ramon's answer. Soon they abandon their messenger and shout up and down the stairs.
The Sea Inside is a bit too well-scrubbed and pure of heart, and its main character is too idealized. But it's a smart, honorable movie aimed at grownups, and you can't have too many of those. o
