The Unseen Movie Review

Beyond the Sea

Does anyone under fifty know who Bobby Darin was? The 1950s/60s Rock’n’Roll singer, actor and entertainer was, for a time, a fairly big name and a bit of a teen idol, but even at the time was never able to compete with the likes of his contemporaries Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis. Probably his best known song is his version of “Mack the Knife”, taken from Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brech’s The Threepenny Opera, but the take on the same song by jazz legend Louis Armstrong is almost certainly more familiar to today’s music lovers. Since his death in 1973 he has faded into obscurity.

At first glance he’d seem a very odd choice for a biopic. Add to this the fact that the actor playing him is eight years older than Darin was when he died, it seems even odder.

Thankfully, the actor in the lead is the always watchable, immensely versatile Kevin Spacey, who also directs – and even does his own singing. In fact, this has been his pet project for years (which is part of the reason he is now a tad old for the part). Add to Spacey’s presence the fact that the screenwriters include the people responsible for the superb biopics Quiz Show, Donny Brasco and Bugsy, and the project starts to look interesting.

The thing is, although Bobby Darin is now mostly forgotten, his life makes for perfect biopic material. Hit by a severe rheumatic fever as a child, he wasn’t expected to live beyond the age of fifteen, and suffered near-crippling heart problems throughout his life. He was born on the wrong side of the tracks, brought up in a poor single-parent family, and was Italian-American at a time when such a background still ensured serious prejudice in the entertainment industry in which he determined to make his career.

It really is the classic biopic – bad childhood, beats the odds, fame, love, rejection, involvement in major events, tragic death. Luckily, Spacey is not only a good enough actor to keep the audience entertained, but an imaginative enough director to create an interesting film out of material which could have created yet another worthy but bland movie about someone’s interesting life.

It should come as little surprise that Spacey is a good director – why else would he have been given the responsibility of running London’s prestigious Old Vic theatre? – yet still his accomplishment in twisting time and reality to provide a continuous link between the poor, ill child and wealthy superstar and the music and the man is impressive. His inventiveness has turned this into an interesting film in its own right, even without the strong central plot of Darin’s event-packed life.

What could seem gimmicky - a street breaks into a full-on dance routine, the old Darin talks to his childhood self – actually works very well. With the support of actors of the calibre of John Goodman, Bob Hoskins, Kate Bosworth and Greta Scacchi, plus – to emphasise the point – the fact that Spacey does all his own song and dance routines, and does them amazingly, this is actually a pretty damn good movie.

Is it enough to revive the memory of Bobby Darin? That remains to be seen. What it is, however, is an accomplished and interesting film from a talented director featuring a superb central performance from one of today’s best actors. You can’t ask for a lot more than that.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM