Neil Young's Film Lounge

Neil Young’s Film Lounge – Beyond The Sea

BEYOND THE SEA

6/10

US (US-Ger-UK) 2004 : Kevin SPACEY : 120 mins

                                             Conceit is thinking you’re great; egotism is knowing it.
                                                                                 Bobby Darrin

Bobby Darrin biopic Beyond the Sea counts as something of a personal triumph for Kevin Spacey, if only because it halts one of the most spectacularly disastrous post-Oscar runs endured by any actor. After his American Beauty win, Spacey’s major-studio leading-role releases were the dire Pay It Forward (2000), the disappointing K-PAX and Shipping News from 2001 and the unendurable Life of David Gale (2003). None of which made a penny at the box office. Beyond the Sea may not turn the tide for Spacey financially – despite post-modern trappings, it’s essentially too old-fashioned a musical to appeal to mainstream audiences much below the age of 50 – but the critics have been mostly very upbeat, even the more cautious conceding that Spacey does turn in a remarkable impersonation of Darrin.

Darrin or Darin? Are you confident which is correct?* It says something about how far Darin’s star has fallen that very few viewers who aren’t fans would know for sure, and while Spacey’s impressive ability to belt out swing numbers should ensure him a few Vegas gigs in future if his acting work dries up, most of us will have to take on trust that he’s as convincing in the role as Darin-admirers reckom. The fundamental question which Spacey must address is this: does Darin’s career really justify such an elaborate celebration?

Spacey is on record as saying that, were it not for Darin’s early death (at 37 – Spacey is 45) he’s be up there “with Ray Charles and Elvis”, for a good hour and a half of this two-hour movie we remain unconvinced that his story is really so remarkable (it doesn’t help that, if anything, Spacey actually sells Darin a little short, as we never quite realise what a multi-talented instrumentalist the singer was in real life.) This isn’t exactly a drastic rags-to-riches rise, although young Walden Cassotto (as he was then called) doesn’t exactly have a trouble-free childhood. Raised in a very loving environment by his lone-parent mother Polly (Brenda Blethyn), sister Nina (Caroline Aaron) and brother-in-law Charlie (Bob Hoskins) he suffers from such a severe heart defect that doctors predict he won’t see his fifteenth birthday. But once past that milestone, there’s no stopping the aspiring performer and success – if not quite overnight – comes relatively quickly and easily.

Once established as a singer (via hits like the asinine “Splish Splash”) Darin’s ambition drives him to challenge the likes of Frank Sinatra by taking on classics such as “Mack the Knife” (Sinatra reckoned Darin’s rendition was ‘definitive’). And after turning his hand to acting he rapidly nabs an Oscar nomination (a feat that has so far eluded luminaries like Donald Sutherland and Jennifer Jason Leigh) for his supporting role in Captain Newman, M.D – he loses, setting him off on his amusing rant against winner Melvyn Douglas that’s the closest we come to Peter Sellers-style obnoxiousness. Though described as “cocky, brash and arrogant” Darin comes across as no worse than a somewhat self-centred charmer – in the field of romance he finds predictably smooth success, setting his sights on starlet Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth, who one hopes arrived on set singing a certain Stockard Channing number from Grease) and successfully taking her up the aisle in double-quick time.

So far: so entertaining… and so what. It’s only in the late sixties, when Darin’s career and personal life hits a few bumpy spots, that we finally start to see what attracted Spacey to this specific material (the director-star started life as Kevin Spacey Fowler, but plenty of performers change their names). Darin learns the shocking truth about his idyllic family life, his marriage goes off the rails, and at the same time his commitment to political issues is sharpened by the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He undergoes a radical image change, ditching his toupeed lounge-lizard look and appearing in clubs as folkie ‘Bob Darin,’ strumming out ‘A Simple Song of Freedom’ with its lyric “We the people here don’t want no war.” This doesn’t go down too well with Copacabana audiences, until Darin stumbles upon the idea that “people hear what they see,” returning to his slick old image but using it to cloak his (relatively) radical message.

This project has been on the go since Spacey’s first Oscar triumph for The Usual Suspects (1995) so it’s perhaps unwise to read too much topicality into Darin’s anti-war stance. But Spacey has never made any secret of his leftish leanings, and in the current US climate (when an artist as unthreatening as Linda Ronstadt can be booed off stage) any even mildly subversive mainstream entertainment is welcome. Just as Darin found a synthesis between his politics and his showbiz presentational skills, Spacey is clearly aiming to “sugar the pill” with Beyond the Sea – but if anything he goes too far: the picture is about twenty minutes too long, with an excess of old-school song-n-dance numbers (including an especially gratutious one tacked on right at the end). The anti-war stuff comes in very late, and much more time is devoted to Darin’s rather less interesting courtship of Sandra Dee – their growing marital discord is familiar biopic material, as is the sudden exposure of the Cassotto family’s long-closeted skeletons.

Likewise the screenplay (reportedly written by Paul Attanasio, Lorenzo Carcaterra, Jeffrey Meek and James Toback) makes some half-hearted stabs at deconstructionism: what we’re watching is supposedly the film Spacey himself is making of his life (also entitled ‘Beyond the Sea’) at some unspecified point towards the end of his career. This technique anticipates and defuses potential criticisms about Spacey being too old to play Darin during his earlier years (“Splish Splash” made the charts while he was barely into his 20s), but Spacey’s Beyond the Sea is really nothing like anything that would have been made in the 1960s or 1970s, and some of the gimmicky “distancing” techniques employed – omniscient voiceover; the guiding presence of a ghostly young Walden Cassotto (William Ulrich); Darin breaking in and out of the narrative – come and go without any noticeable obnoxiousness. Though described as “cocky, brash and arrogant” Darin comes across as no worse than a somewhat self-centred charmer (perhaps taking Darin’s lead, second-time director Spacey gives himself a conspicuous number of closeups). In the field of romance our hero finds predictably smooth success, setting his sights on starlet Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth, who one hopes arrived on set singing a certain Stockard Channing number from Grease) and successfully taking her up the aisle in double-quick time.

So far: so entertaining… and so what. It’s only in the late sixties, when Darin’s career and personal life hits a few bumpy spots, that we finally start to see what attracted Spacey to this specific material (the director-star started life as Kevin Spacey Fowler, but plenty of performers change their names). Darin learns the shocking truth about his idyllic family life, his marriage goes off the rails, and at the same time his commitment to political issues is sharpened by the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He undergoes a radical image change, ditching his toupeed lounge-lizard look and appearing in clubs as folkie ‘Bob Darin,’ strumming out ‘A Simple Song of Freedom’ with its lyric “We the people here don’t want no war.” This doesn’t go down too well with Copacabana audiences, until Darin stumbles upon the idea that “people hear what they see,” returning to his slick old image but using it to cloak his (relatively) radical message.

This project has been on the go since Spacey’s first Oscar triumph for The Usual Suspects (1995) so it’s perhaps unwise to read too much topicality into Darin’s anti-war stance. But Spacey has never made any secret of his leftish leanings, and in the current US climate (when an artist as unthreatening as Linda Ronstadt can be booed off stage) any even mildly subversive mainstream entertainment is welcome. Just as Darin found a synthesis between his politics and his showbiz presentational skills, Spacey is clearly aiming to “sugar the pill” with Beyond the Sea – but if anything he goes too far: the picture is about twenty minutes too long, with an excess of old-school song-n-dance numbers (including an especially gratutious one tacked on right at the end). The anti-war stuff comes in very late, and much more time is devoted to Darin’s rather less interesting courtship of Sandra Dee – their growing marital discord is familiar biopic material, as is the sudden exposure of the Cassotto family’s long-closeted skeletons.

Likewise the screenplay (reportedly written by Paul Attanasio, Lorenzo Carcaterra, Jeffrey Meek and James Toback) makes some half-hearted stabs at deconstructionism: what we’re watching is supposedly the film Spacey himself is making of his life (also entitled ‘Beyond the Sea’) at some unspecified point towards the end of his career. This technique anticipates and defuses potential criticisms about Spacey being too old to play Darin during his earlier years (“Splish Splash” made the charts while he was barely into his 20s), but Spacey’s Beyond the Sea is really nothing like anything that would have been made in the 1960s or 1970s, and some of the gimmicky “distancing” techniques employed – omniscient voiceover; the guiding presence of a ghostly young Walden Cassotto (William Ulrich); Darin breaking in and out of the narrative – come and go without any noticeable rhyme or reason. We’re a very long way from Charlie Kaufman territory – apart from one daft, fleeting gag involving Angie Dickinson that’s arguably worth the price of admission on its own.

26th October, 2004
[seen 7th October : Odeon, Nuneaton : press show - CinemaDays event]

* In fact it’s ‘Darin’ – according to Beyond the Sea, the man born Walden Robert Cassotto stumbled on his stage-name when he spotted the malfunctioning neon sign of a Chinese restaurant in which the first three letters of the word MANDARIN were flickering on and off. Discarding the “man” to discover one’s identity? Discuss.

by Neil Young

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