PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 12/16/04)

Kevin Spacey is a darn good actor, and he's a pretty good singer to boot. But those traits alone do not excuse the painful experience to be had sitting through Beyond the Sea. In bringing the life story of '50s crooner Bobby Darin to the screen, Spacey has crafted a vanity project of appalling proportions. He writes, directs, sings, dances, and stars, effectively sucking all the attention in the room towards himself like some great big black hole of ego and insecurity.

It's a fright to see one of our generation's most gifted actors adrift on a sea of his own making. In terms of 2004's most egregious casting gaffes, Beyond the Sea is surpassed only by Geoffrey Rush's turn in HBO's dreary The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. Much has been said about the age discrepancy between Spacey and his subject (Darin was eight years younger than Spacey when he died), but the real problem is more a matter of charisma. Spacey earned his Oscars playing the kind of guys who blend in with the woodwork, sad sacks who couldn't muster the confidence to commandeer a nightclub.

Nevertheless, Spacey insists on hogging the spotlight. He portrays Darin as a self-obsessed perfectionist, casting himself in the "autobiopic" of his own life (a vanity project within a vanity project, if you will). But Darin's forgotten a thing or two about his past, so he's brought back to reality by bizarre lectures from the child actor who plays him as a boy (a Sixth Sense-creepy William Ullrich). As in the comparably tedious De-Lovely  earlier this year, even such a bewildering, self-reflexive framing device leaves the audience asking, Why?

Was it the grim reality of Darin's picturebook marriage to Sandra Dee (played with doe-eyed naïveté by Kate Bosworth) that attracted Spacey to the project? Or perhaps he was smitten by the family secret that forced Darin to reevaluate his identity as an adult? Spacey himself claims that his primary motive was to remind the world what a great entertainer Darin was, but surely history holds a worthier subject for Spacey's efforts.

One must assume that Spacey saw something of himself in Darin's experiences. For anyone not immediately enamored with the movie's musical aspect (which includes lavish Technicolor-inspired production numbers), Beyond the Sea becomes a guessing game: Where does Darin end and Spacey begin? And does anyone really care to know the answer?

—Peter Debruge