Beyond The Sea Review
by Michael Dequina (mrbrown AT iname DOT com)December 21st, 2004
_Beyond_the_Sea_ (PG-13) * 1/2 (out of ****)
There was once a man who wanted nothing more than to move the world through song and dance, and that man's name is... Kevin Spacey. What, you thought _Beyond_the_Sea_ was about Bobby Darin, the singer/songwriter/actor who made the titular tune a standard? Far from it, never mind that director/star/co-scripter (with Lewis Colick) Spacey rudimentarily hits key events in Darin's life, such as his rise to teen idoldom via "Splish Splash"; his career prime as a popular nightclub attraction and Oscar-nominated actor; his fairy tale-gone-bad marriage to young starlet Sandra Dee (here played by an underused Kate Bosworth); his untimely death at age 37. What this is instead is The Very Special Bobby Darin Tribute episode of_The_Kevin_Spacey_Variety_Hour_, as Spacey is quite clearly more concerned with showcasing his own, heretofore largely unexploited musical abilities. To that end, he has clearly succeeded. Spacey's slick, swingin' voice and style (which makes one wonder just how much better he would have been in _Chicago_ than the vocally-challenged Richard Gere) definitely does justice to Darin's signature songs and sound; and he gamely hoofs it up in some admittedly imaginative production numbers, particularly the title song, which Darin croons to woo Dee.
But the film is supposed to be about Darin and not Spacey, and as the biography it's intended to be, _Beyond_the_Sea_ is a failure. The mess of a script, credited to Spacey and Lewis Colick (though early prints and awards consideration DVD's featured no writing credit whatsoever--all too appropriately so), bears the obvious scars of incessant rewrites from the get-go: the opening passages introduce a cumbersome and needlessly convoluted film-within-a-film-within-a-film framing device that is abandoned almost as soon as it is established, begging the question, "What was the point of *that*?" That question pops up many times over during the film, as its screenplay appears to have been committeed to the point of sterile shallowness. While various important moments in his life are enacted, never once do we really get a sense of who the man was except that he was arrogant and a hell of an entertainer. That can perhaps apply to Spacey himself, as he shows he has considerable musical chops of his own, yet somehow has the hubris to turn a film ostensibly about someone else's life into a celebration of himself.
If one is to indulge Spacey's whim, one is better off skipping the film and picking up _Beyond_the_Sea_'s soundtrack, from Rhino/Atco records. The album features Spacey covers of 18 Darin tracks, from standards such as the title tune and "Mack the Knife" to bubblegum hits such as "Splish Splash" to his far less successful forays into socially-conscious folk tunes, such as "Simple Song of Freedom." As he previously displayed in his version of "That Old Black Magic" on the _Midnight_in_the_Garden_of_Good_and_Evil_ soundtrack, Spacey is clearly most in his vocal element when tackling the more jazzy, swingy songs, but he acquits himself well on the less loungey selections; the moving closer "The Curtain Falls" is especially impressive. If one learns anything from _Beyond_the_Sea_, it's that Spacey longs to sing on a large scale (a lesson further reinforced by his current nationwide promo concert tour); support that worthy ambition by picking up his CD, and discourage him from making onanistic vanity projects by not buying a ticket to his film.
©2004 Michael Dequina
Michael Dequina
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