K-PAX Review
by Harvey S. Karten (film_critic AT compuserve DOT com)October 23rd, 2001
K-PAX
Reviewed by Harvey Karten
Universal Pictures
Director: Iain Softley
Writer: Bryan Goluboff, Charles Leavitt, novel by Gene Brewer Cast: Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridget, Alfre Woodard, Mary
McCormack
Screened at: Sony Lincoln Sq., NYC, 10/22/01
What makes sci-fi work for you? For me, a science fiction story must be absorbing above all; it should have internal logic; it should say something about the contemporary world. "Stepford Wives" is one example of a good one. 1. An entrancing tale; 2. A message about feminism; 3. Believable in its way. "Logan's Run" is another, with its 1. absorbing visuals; 2. Credible story; 3. Its point about how our society is so youth-absorbed that it disregards the input of its elders.
"K-PAX" by contrast is shaky. Director Iain Softley wants to keep the audience guessing about the verity of claims made by Prot (Kevin Spacey), a man who is considered by most to be out of his mind, though harmless, and who is therefore kept in a psychiatric institute for weeks. Now, if you take a look at the patients in the building that houses the emotionally disturbed you may note that not a single one of them would qualify to remain there as none of them is violent. Obnoxious, maybe; but that's about it. Also: this is presumably a government-supported institution, and we know what those places are like. Yet prominent psychiatrist Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges) gives them individual therapy in a plush office, the inmates get group therapy, and the grounds are luxurious. Given the fact that psychiatrists dressed in $1,000 suits like Mark Powell can get $150 per session in New York City, is there any credibility here? The biggest problem in logic is that only a halfhearted attempt is made to explain the identity of the visitor who claims he is from K-PAX. Oh, and when Dr. Powell goes to New Mexico to check out a lead he receives about his star patient, he winds up ultimately in the town of Guelph. Someone gave him the wrong directions, because Guelph is in the province of Ontario.
As for the commentary on today's society, there's nothing deeper than the sentimental twaddle peddled by the song, "C'mon people/Smile on your brother/Everybody get together, try to love one another right now." Terrific melody, insipid message.
The principal reason for seeing the film in two words should be Kevin Spacey but here he turns in one of his least edgy, most gruesomely sentimental characterizations. Spacey is in the role of Prot, who appears in Grand Central Station one day, is incorrectly believed to have mugged a woman, and is escorted to a psychiatric institution by the cops simply because he says that he is from another planet. (I'd like a dollar for every New Yorker who thinks this: remember that New Yorkers ARE from another planet and what's more they'd hardly be hauled away to a looney bin for saying so.) Dr. Mark Powell is assigned his case and takes an interest in the man because Prot is the smartest patient he knows. In the film's best one-up line, when Prot goes against regulations in his comments to the patients, the doctor warns him that Prot's role is not to try to cure others. That is the doctors' job. "Then why aren't you curing them?" Prot replies.
"K-PAX" goes wrong every time is milks the story for goo...the ways that Prot is able to make dramatic progress with the patients when doctors can do virtually nothing with them...the idyllic suburban scene featuring the Powell family with Golden Labrador Retriever, loving and sympathetic wife (Mary McCormack), the motif of man-in-second-marriage-with- estranged-son-from first. The film goes along just fine when Prot wows the astrophysicists with knowledge of outer space that he could not possibly have known if he were a mere human being. There is an interesting casting decision here, as Jeff Bridges is not on the other side of the desk from the time he played the Starman in 1984, abducting Karen Allen and gaining her affection because he looks almost exactly like her dead husband.
Unfortunately, if you think there's anything new here, you ought to get out more often. Loving father looks adoringly at his two sleeping daughters. Supportive wife. Indifferent medical staff. Amazed scientists. If only Dr. Powell set his alarm when he took a nap on July 27, we might have gotten to the bottom of his patient's identity.
Rated PG-13. Running time: 120 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, [email protected]
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
