Beyond the Sea

Screen lover: Spacey's leaden presence nearly sinks Beyond the Sea

By Jeannette Catsoulis

There's a phrase repeated several times in Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey's fanciful and misguided stab at the late, great '60s pop singer Bobby Darin: "People hear what they see." What this means isn't entirely clear; but the vacuity of the claim is an apt metaphor for the movie itself, which is nothing more than a superficial dash through a brief and haunted life.

Vanity trumping common sense, the 45-year-old Spacey unwisely casts himself as the doomed performer, who expired at the age of 37 after a lifelong battle with a weak heart. The age discrepancy is less noticeable the more wan and breathless Darin becomes, but in the early scenes the camera is forced to observe a polite distance. No matter how we squint, the middle-aged man with the coal-black, laminated toupée, wriggling ecstatically to "Dream Lover," is no one's idea of a teen heartthrob.

Following a childhood bout with rheumatic fever, young Walden Cassotto (a name pleading to be changed) isn't expected to live beyond his 15th birthday. Undeterred, he has a huge hit with the inane ditty "Splish Splash" before the age of 20, cheered on by his adored mother, Polly (a typically over-the-top Brenda Blethyn), a retired vaudeville singer who tells her son his absent father was a dangerous gangster. This may be true, but we have no way of knowing as Spacey's film is so surreal and insubstantial only the most prominent facts of Darin's life feel authentic.

Using a contrived, film-within-a film framing device, we're whisked through Darin's rocky marriage to Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth, as "lousy with virginity" as Stockard Channing claimed unforgettably in Grease), his rise to pop and lounge-lizard fame (seven Top Ten singles and two Grammys) and movie stardom (an Oscar nomination for the deathless Captain Newman, M.D.). Along the way, the movie bursts into inappropriate musical numbers intended to provide psychological depth (shades of Pennies from Heaven), but we're distracted by Spacey's awkwardness and the embarrassment of his wooing of the childlike Bosworth. Prancing and warbling "Mack the Knife" in acid yellow suits and cranberry shirts (the film's colors are eyeball-searing), Spacey is like the mortifying uncle who insists on dancing with the young'uns at family parties.

Beyond the Sea is the latest in a long line of career disasters for Spacey (Pay it Forward, K-Pax, The Life of David Gale), whose 1999 Oscar for American Beauty seems to have messed with his head. Darin may be a worthy subject, but this disjointed fairy tale doesn't do him justice. Only toward the end, as the declining singer suffers a series of disasters--a failing marriage, a devastating family secret, and the death of Bobby Kennedy, for whom Darin had been campaigning--does the film develop some poignancy and heart. And politics: watching Darin threaten a sit-in at the Copacabana when the owner refuses to book a black opening act, or get booed off the stage for singing anti-war songs (not very good ones, admittedly), I wished Spacey had concentrated more on the man and less on the fantasy sequences.

But sometimes, when the light hits just the right way, Spacey looks eerily like his hero: a restless shoulder movement, a way of planting his feet, a sudden lightness as he bounds onto a stage. Then it's gone; and as the movie builds toward its excruciatingly maudlin finale, we hear Spacey's voice as though defending himself: "Memories are like moonbeams--we do with them what we want." More's the pity.