K-PAX []
Earth to Spacey. Running time: 120 minutes. Rated PG-13 (moderate profanity, violence). At AMC Empire 25, Loews Lincoln Square, Kips Bay, others.
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IT’S easy to see what drew Kevin Spacey to “K-PAX” – what Oscar winner worth his salt wouldn’t want to play a messianic mental patient who claims he’s from outer space?
Unfortunately, all it offers the rest of us are two of the smuggest lead performances in recent memory (by two normally wonderful actors) and the biggest load of New Agey hogwash to grace the big screen since Spacey’s “Pay it Forward.”
Spacey plays a mysterious figure who calls himself Prot. Rounded up in the wake of a mugging in Grand Central Terminal, he claims to be an extraterrestrial and gets shipped to the fictional Psychiatric Institute of Manhattan when he fails to respond to heavy medication at Bellevue.
The patients there are the lovable eccentrics you see only in movies like “Awakenings” – that is, they appear better adjusted than some people you encounter on the street.
All they need, suggests the fatuous script (adapted by Charles Leavitt from a novel by Gene Brewer that resembles the 1986 Argentinean film “Man Looking Southwest”), is for medical professionals to pay some attention to them rather than rely on drugs.
And when Prot, who eats bananas with their skins and wears dark glasses indoors, argues persuasively that he’s on a fact-finding mission from K-PAX, a planet 1,000 light years distant, Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges), the institute’s overworked director, does pay attention.
Dr. Powell drops everything else and sets about finding the trauma he believes caused Prot’s delusion.
But for some reason that’s never really clear, the doctor decides to run some of his patient’s claims past astronomers, who convene a meeting straight out of “Good Will Hunting” at the Museum of Natural History’s new Rose Center.
Prot wows the profs – and he begins curing those lovable mental patients of their tics, at one point producing the bluebird of happiness (I am not making this up) to make them feel better. He offers to take one of them home when he returns home to K-PAX in a few weeks, a la “Cocoon.”
Dr. Powell feels better, too, when Prot describes a planet where there are no laws and no lawyers, because everyone knows right from wrong. Of course, there are no families on K-PAX, which is the one advantage Earth has over his home (cue violins).
So do you think the workaholic Dr. Powell will wake up and smell the roses, and pay attention to his patients, his neglected wife (Mary McCormack) and his long-estranged son?
Will Universal Pictures push Spacey’s show-offy performance (at one point, he barks at a dog to communicate), utterly unrestrained by the intervention of director Iain Softley (“Wings of the Dove”), for a Best Actor Oscar?
The supporting characters (including Alfre Woodard as another psychiatrist) are so sketchily drawn that the disappointing “K-PAX” virtually becomes a two-character film – a mighty talky one with an utterly banal ending.
Unfortunately, Bridges’ Dr. Powell is just as big a self-satisfied bore as Spacey’s Prot, who is essentially “My Favorite Martian” without the laughs.