K-PAX Review
by Karina Montgomery (cinerina AT flash DOT net)November 12th, 2001
K-Pax
Matinee Price
This film is just like reading a nice poem - pretty, thoughtful;, with gentle surprises tucked in, an encouragement to form one's own impressions, and then a smiling slide into forgettability. Also like a poem, the central image is what holds it together, rather than a compelling narrative structure. Kevin Spacey is that key element, the locus that makes the unfortunately titled tale work. Former Starman Jeff Bridges is an obsessive dismissive foil to Spacey's gentle Prot (rhymes with goat). Is he or isn't he? It doesn't even matter - the pleasure is in listening to the verses by Charles Leavitt, who has sunchased the novel of Gene Brewer's. Either he's human, which works, or he's not, which works too. Spacey's performance generously allows you to make your own decision.
A user on the IMDB likened it to 12 Monkeys meets Cocoon, which is both short-sighted and completely misleading - 12 Monkeys is tense, surreal, funny, and circuitous, and Cocoon is elderly, feel-good, and a little pap-like. Just a little. Yes, the inmates of the asylum - I'm sorry, patients in the psychiatric hospital - are charming and eccentric and manageably cuddly. Yes, the looming identity question of whether or not Prot is actually from space is a wee bit like Bruce Willis' internal conflict for one reel of 12 Monkeys. However, this movie feels more like A.I. in its sweet contemplative passages, or The Green Mile in the wonderful reactions to the miracle of Coffey.
The cinematographer John Mathieson (Gladiator) caresses light of all forms with his camera for most of the shots, sliding along a dust-limned beam like a finger along the back of an antique chair. The result is the delicate magical feel as City of Angels, tasting light, feeling the air around us. Nearly every shot is littered with delicate chromatic aberrations, thrown casually by prisms or drinking glasses or what have you, snippets of the visual poem of bent light. The little fragments of rainbow serve as a moderately obvious reminder that there is more than just what our locked-in senses, our logic, can perceive. It's what makes this film worth watching. That, and Kevin Spacey. Prot manages to spout the not-unusual but certainly timely late-model Star Trek messages of the inherent savagery and short-sightedness of humans these days, without sounding condescending or condemning. Prot, whether in his mind or back on K-Pax, is a scientist as well; and watching him and Bridges tasting each other's minds is the dynamic that makes this a watchable film.
Bridges is similar in carriage to his president character in The Contender - very intelligent but also very stubborn, and definitely not willing to expand his concept of what's possible beyond what he knows for certain himself. Perhaps it's psychologist training that makes people that way, maybe it's a zodiac sign; either way, Bridges brings more of it across than would simply be implied by the scripted dialogue. They both did a great job, and there are little vignettes that allow the audience, if they are willing to not be scientific, to doubt, and to wonder. A film that does that will get my blessing every time.
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These reviews (c) 2001 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but just credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks.
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