Beyond The Sea
Fantasy Life
I don’t know if you watch sports — specifically NBA basketball — enough to get this, but maybe you have. Nike is running these commercials — most of them animated cartoons — starring Cleveland Cavaliers phenom LeBron James. (If you don’t know from LeBron James, you can skip this paragraph with no loss.) The commercials show LeBron as a basketball samurai, fighting ninjas and Shao-Lin masters in the “Chamber of Fear”, whatever that is. It sounds ridiculous, and it is, until you think about it. Here’s LeBron James, 20 years old as of this writing, a millionaire several times order, a God-given talent to play NBA hoops, the best player in the league as soon as Shaq retires, and it isn’t enough, he has to be Bruce Lee on top of that.
Well, that’s his fantasy, and unlike most of us, he has the ability to live it (at least in cartoon form). Kevin Spacey has his fantasy, too, and despite two Oscars and whatever money he’s made doing movies, he wants to live it out, too, and good for him. That’s basically what Beyond The Sea is, really, Kevin Spacey’s fantasy life, in a theater near you.
Kevin Spacey wants to be Bobby Darin. And if you’re young enough to know who LeBron James is, you may want to know who Bobby Darin was. Basically, he was Frank Sinatra at a 40% markdown. (Spacey’s Darin spends a lot of time staring at Sinatra posters.) He was a teen idol, briefly (with a silly song called “Splish-Splash” that shows up in dishwasher commercials and suchlike to this day), and married Sandra Dee, who was the Jessica Simpson of her day, except that Sandra Dee knows the difference between tuna fish and chicken, or at least I hope so.
Anyway, so that’s Bobby Darin, and if you don’t know anything about him going in, you’ll probably like Beyond The Sea more than you otherwise might have. It helps to like early rock ‘n’ roll, and late swing music, and to know what the Copacabana was before Barry Manilow got a hold of it. Anyone who is really a Bobby Darin purist (I don’t know any of these people, but they might be out there) is going to be a bit off-put by the proceedings, because Beyond The Sea is not what you would call realistic. (Not least because it’s Spacey’s voice, not Darin’s, that you hear.)
The unreality of Beyond The Sea is illustrated early on; there’s a conversation between Darin and the young boy who is playing his younger self in the movie (there’s some foolishness concerning a movie-within-a-movie that you can ignore). Darin walks us through his early childhood illness (which would kill him at a young age) and shows how his love of music carried him through, which ends with Spacey/Darin doing a nice MGM musical moment, dancing in the streets of the Bronx with a cavalcade of extras. The little boy interrupts him, pointing out that this couldn’t have happened. “Memories are like moonbeams,” Spacey/Darin explains. “You make of them what you will.”
Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned. What follows is not the life of Bobby Darin, but a fantasia on Bobby Darin themes, which is really just an excuse for Kevin Spacey to trot out his lounge act. And this is — well, it’s outstanding, probably the best performance of the year by an actor. Heck, I might actually pay a cover charge and order a watered down Maker’s Mark to see him do it live, in person, in a nightclub somewhere, if that could be arranged. Whenever Spacey’s on stage, Beyond The Sea swings with energy, rhythm, and flair.
Spacey, of course, can’t completely whitewash his subject, and so you get the dark side of his idol; the breakup of his marriage to Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth, looking smashing), a shattering revelation about his mother (the always-welcome Brenda Blethyn) and an embarrassing slide into radical 60’s politics. All of these are depressing, but necessary, and it’s reasonable to put up with it in the spirit of the biopic, and move on until the next music scene.
It would be all too easy to dismiss Beyond The Sea as a vanity project, even though that’s exactly what it is. Anybody can make a movie that’s a vanity project, if they want to spend the money badly enough. But Spacey is doing more than puffing himself up. He’s living his dream, and he’s generous enough to share that with us. Even though Beyond The Sea is more than a bit spotty, and weird in places, seeing Spacey go through Bobby Darin Fantasy Camp is a real pleasure, not one to be missed.