K-PAX

Here’s an example of how two great actors can make a movie more interesting, but ultimately are powerless to save it.  K-Pax wants to be lots of things but doesn’t spend enough time on any of them.  It begins as a modern day Star Man (and having Jeff Bridges in a supporting role is a nice coincidence), turns into Awakenings in the second act, and finishes as Good Will Hunting, with a knowing wink to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.  While none of these movies is a bad role model, trying to make a hybrid of them is not such a good idea.

The movie starts with Dr. Mark Powell (the sadly underrated Jeff Bridges), a New York psychiatrist who has a patient (Spacey) transferred to him from Bellevue who goes by the name of Prot (rhymes with goat).  Prot claims he’s from K-Pax, a planet at the farthest reaches of what top astronomers can see from Earth.  Prot is very convincing; his grasp of scientific theory is so extensive (and in some ways, much more advanced) that the astronomers who try to stump him are themselves stupefied.  The other patients at the hospital where Powell works are convinced he’s the real deal.  Powell is convinced to find out just who this K-Paxian really is.

They got the first act just right.  It’s a great mix of humor and wonder, and it is very easy to suspend disbelief.  Spacey is just top notch as Prot, (he pulls off a look in one of his final scenes that alone is worth an Oscar nod) a keen observer but off balance just enough to make us believe he’s not from this world.  Bridges gives yet another rock solid performance as the shrink who is consumed with figuring Prot out, even if it means shutting out his own family.  The original casting, for the record, had Spacey as the psychiatrist, and Will Smith as Prot.  Thank God he chose to do Ali instead.

The problem with K-Pax starts in the second act.  It is here that the structure of these kinds of stories starts to reveal itself.  Ultimately, there is a scene where some otherwise innocent act or nonsequitir will trigger the Traumatic Repressed Memory, and suddenly the movie takes on a whole new yet inevitable direction.  Despite the top notch acting and overall construction of the movie (direction, photography and dialogue are all perfectly fine to good) the story cannot be saved from itself.  But perhaps I say that only because the trailers make you want to believe the movie is something it’s clearly not.

K-Pax wants to marvel you with the thought of what if with regard to extraterrestrial life, but in the end it is little more than a testament to the unstoppable power of delusion.  Kevin Spacey is still The Man, though.