K-Pax
With Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Mary McCormack, Alfre Woodard, David Patrick Kelly, Peter Gerety, Saul Williams, and Celia Weston.
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Based on a novel by Gene Brewer and written by Charles Leavitt, I can’t discount the undeniable pleasure of watching Spacey and Bridges act up a storm, but a lot of what makes this movie watchable and compelling is precisely what’s bogus about it: it gives in to a desire to generalize about people who are mentally ill–a group that doesn’t necessarily include Prot–and to feel satisfied and astute about those generalizations. The basic problem here is the wish to turn crazy people–or so-called crazy people–into allegorical figures, in spite of how varied they are. It’s an impulse that has underwritten such disparate movies as Shock Corridor (1963), King of Hearts (1967), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)–all three of which, perhaps not coincidentally, were contemporary with the counterculture–as well as more recent films such as the New Agey Argentinean art movie Man Facing Southeast (all of the movie buffs I know in Buenos Aires despise this 1986 movie). The value of all these films as social criticism tends to be in inverse proportion to their accuracy in depicting insane people. Shock Corridor is by far the best of the lot, but only because of what it has to say about America; as a movie about insanity, it’s flat-out ridiculous.
Neither Bridges nor Spacey can be blamed for this fussy doppelganger rhetoric. Bridges does a good job of letting his middle-aged spread and middle-class conventionality contribute to our initial impression that he’s a dense therapist who plays by the book, the stooge who lets us appreciate Prot’s superior wisdom; Spacey manages to keep shifting adroitly between someone who might be an extraterrestrial and someone with a carefully buried back story. The blame falls instead on the shaky mystery-story development, which works only temporarily, and then thanks only to the spell cast by the actors. The moment one has a chance to reflect on the plot it starts coming apart at the seams.
