Movie Review - Beyond the Sea

“So you’re playing me,” Kevin Spacey, himself playing Bobby Darin, says to a child actor portraying a younger Bobby early on in Beyond the Sea.

“I am you,” responds the little boy.

“You think you know me?”

“I know you better than they do.”

So begins this biopic, which Spacey wrote, directed and starred in—a strange tale of legendary singer and entertainer Bobby Darin making a movie of his own life, retelling and narrating along the way.

Strange leaps through time and space make the movie-in-a-movie get confusing very quickly. While an interesting paradigm, it ends up seeming like a cheap trick to avoid the obvious question—why is a man in his forties never known for his attractiveness playing a twenty-something heartthrob? After a reporter asks Darin whether he isn’t too old to play himself as a younger man, Darin’s brother in law responds by asking, “How can you be too old to play yourself?”

The implication from this and the other scene is obvious: Spacey is Darin, Spacey knows him better than anyone else ever has. And while his acting is usually good, his singing phenomenal and his respect for Darin obvious, there is something essential lacking in this film.

In one word, it is reality. Fantasy sequences abound in Beyond the Sea: a smiling Darin foregrounds dancing in the streets; a trip to Darin’s mother’s funeral after which he takes off his mourning suit, puts on a bow tie and exits out of the back of the church onto a stage; the child actor’s watch slows down as Darin faces the physical consequences of a childhood illness.

It is hard to see, through all the spectacle and some melodramatic dialogue what the true conflict in Darin’s life actually is. All we really know is that he fights with his wife, actress Sandra Dee, that he struggles with his health and that he gets booed off the stage after trying to sing an antiwar song at a nightclub. He eventually finds peace, apparently, although it is hard to tell where that comes from too.

Perhaps the purpose of all this is to show that entertaining can often leave one feeling devoid of anything genuine. This would be believable if the line that led Darin back to stardom and satisfaction were not Sandra saying, “People hear what they see.” Even at the very end of the movie, when Darin, gravely ill but still performing, must go backstage between songs to gulp oxygen from a tank, the message seems to be that image is everything.

Fans of both Spacey and Darin should, and almost certainly will, see this film, if for no other reason than that it shows a different side of both of them—Darin as a conflicted man plagued by his past and uncertain about his future and Spacey as a confident and brash entertainer born to be a star. For what it’s worth, each brings something out in the other.

But Beyond the Sea, while well made, is easily forgettable. “As long as I’m singing, then the world’s all right and everything’s swinging,” assert the lyrics of the closing song. But once the singing is finished, once the film is over, the swinging is gone as well. Moviegoers are left wondering where Beyond the Sea took them, and whether it went anywhere at all.