Do you ever wonder if some movies exist solely for the sake of witty casting? Take K-PAX, for example. It’s about a man who may or not be extraterrestrial, and a psychiatrist who tries to find out one way or the other. So who do we have in the two lead roles? Starman and Spacey.
Then again, you could do worse than Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey, two actors who can utterly inhabit a role. (Try to imagine The Big Lebowski without Bridges or American Beauty without Spacey.) Unfortunately, neither of them seem particularly interested here, which means neither of them are particularly interesting.
Spacey plays “Prot,” (rhymes with “vote”), the might-be-alien in question. Prot arrives in New York out of nowhere—it’s suggested that he travels on beams of light—and tells the police he’s from a planet called K-PAX, a thousand light-years away. This lands him in a Manhattan mental ward, where he comes under the care of Dr. Mark Powell (Bridges), a jaded and overworked psychiatrist. Gradually, Prot’s strangely convincing manner chips away at Powell’s rational skepticism—not to mention the fact that Prot can apparently see into the ultraviolet spectrum and knows things about the Lyra con-stellation that top astrophysicists don’t.
Then there’s Prot’s salutary effect on the other inmates—a gang of stereotypical crazies straight out of the Central Casting Asylum. (They’re the cuckoos to Prot’s alien-mystic Randle McMurphy.) By simply paying attention to them, Prot makes them feel more normal. “It’s my job to cure them,” Powell says to him; “So why don’t you?” Prot answers innocently.
At this point, I started to wonder if Spacey was in K-PAX because of some contractual obligation to the people who made Pay It Forward. Certainly, this isn’t his best work; much of his performance feels as though it’s been phoned in from the Lyra constellation. Still, even half-assed Spacey is better than most. He gives Prot a quality that’s part android, part child (when he eats a banana, he eats it peel and all). One minute, he’s conversing with the Powell family dog; the next, he’s uttering smart little quips in that inimitable Spacey deadpan. The film keeps us guessing about Prot’s true origins, yet behind his dark sunglasses, you can almost see the self-aware twinkle in Spacey’s eye. (In the character’s is-he-or-isn’t-he ambivalence, Spacey seems at times to be sharing another witty casting joke with the audience.)
As the concerned but perplexed psychiatrist, Bridges isn’t required to do much more than look either concerned or perplexed. His character is on board chiefly to find out who or what Prot really is, and to benefit from the preachy K-PAXian’s from-a-distance wisdom. The role isn’t unlike the one Bridges played in The Fisher King, but it’s far more conventional. Like Spacey, he’s aware that his best game isn’t called for.
As a result, both are only as good as the mediocre material they have to work with. Which goes to show that even without witty casting, movies like K-PAX would still exist—they’re a way for actors like Spacey and Bridges to keep themselves in the spotlight between the roles we’ll remember them for.
(2/4)