Beyond The Sea

I like Kevin Spacey. I like Bobby Darin, too. Okay...I like “Mack The Knife," and I don't have anything against the concept of Bobby Darin. But man...Beyond The Sea was tough to take. If there were truth in advertising, it would have been called Beyond The Sea: A Hagiographic Musicography. Spacey wore the hats of writer, director, and star in this picture (and he actually sang the songs), and it’s clear from the way Darin is portrayed in the film that Spacey thinks awfully well of him, even when his violent temper is on full display. We’re all of us more than willing not only to forgive, but oftentimes to overlook, the faults of our heroes, and that goes double for Spacey with respect to Darin. It’s even possible that Spacey is trying to absolve Darin of some of those faults by paying such a dazzling homage - complete with new song arrangements and some really fabulous choreography.

There are some nice moments in the first two acts - including when Darin, in brash fashion for a young guy getting his first invite to the club he’s always wanted to play, tells the manager of the Copacabana in Las Vegas that he won’t play the club if the black comedian Darin wants to open for him is barred from opening because of his color; but those moments get lost in the non-stop song-and-dance numbers and in Spacey’s unabashed worship of Darin. By the time the third act rolls around and real life has caught up to Darin’s fantasyland, it’s just not quite enough to redeem the film. It’s all well and good that Darin made an effort to save himself from himself, but the sharp juxtaposition of the rock-and-roll Darin from the first two acts to the beaten down, older Darin in the third act (throughout most of which he looks like an aged version of Napoleon Dynamite’s brother, Kip) is so unbalanced as to be jarring. Now that Spacey has this out of his system, I’m just going to hope that he never, never gets the green light to do it again.