I’m always wary when a Hollywood heavyweight is listed as writer, director and star: it’s all too easy for a film to go off the rails when just one person, with a serious emotional investment in the project and no one likely to say “No” to them, is calling all the creative shots. But as pet projects go, Beyond the Sea isn’t bad.
Kevin Spacey obviously has a deep admiration not only for Bobby Darin, the subject of the biopic, but for the whole big band, Vegas nightclub scene. The venues of the era – the Copa, the Flamingo, and the rest – are re-created just as lovingly as the music itself. And though Spacey really has trouble pulling off the youthful Darin offstage (alluded to in the script, when someone tells Darin he is too old to play himself in his own biopic), for my money he does an impressive job with the performances and the songs.
That being said, I had trouble swallowing the film’s central gimmick: that the whole thing is a semi-fictionalized, half-dream-sequence film-within-a-film of Bobby Darin’s own biographical movie. The elder Darin, apparently playing himself, begins by raging around the set, and is only calmed by an encounter with the ghost of the younger Darin, or the actor playing the younger Darin, or a bit of both. This set-up frames the main action – Darin’s all-too-brief rise and fall and rise in show business – and interrupts periodically throughout.
I could have done without it. It’s a shame Spacey didn’t trust that the viewers would find Bobby Darin’s life, told simply, as fascinating as he himself obviously does.
by Eva Holland | Source: Lions Gate DVD
09 Dec 2008 3:15 PM | Submit Comment
