While Kevin Spacey’s TV work in the late 1980’s was certainly impressive, in movies he never seemed to connect with audiences. That is until 1992, when he began gathering steam with a great turn in James Foley’s screen adaptation of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.” In a movie filled with strong performances, Spacey takes on a role that is arguably the toughest and least showy. In a movie filled with great lines, his exasperated plea to one of the salesmen, “Will you go to lunch? GO to lunch. WILL YOU? Go to LUNCH!”, is a great example of an actor being in perfect sync with every nuance of the material.
In 1994, the greatest year ever, he appeared in three films, whose grosses range from $377K to $21M. I didn’t see the highest grosser of the bunch, “Iron Will,” but the other two, “Swimming With Sharks*” and “The Ref,” signaled Spacey’s impending arrival as a star.
Ted Demme’s “The Ref,” is a small studio movie about a cat burglar (Denis Leary in full MTV sarcastic rant mode) who takes an unhappy couple (Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey) hostage on Christmas Eve, and finds himself having to referee their vitriolic shouting matches. As Spacey was not yet a star, the movie’s hook was Denis Leary, who was also not a star, but one gets the feeling it was supposed to be his “48 Hrs.”
“The Ref” is not nearly that good. It’s darker than it needs to be, and it doesn’t feel like it escalates as it should (pacing was never the late Ted Demme’s strong suit, see “Bloat”), but the actors really dig into the script, by Richard LaGrevanese and Marie Weiss. Spacey in particular brings to life the type of character he seems to be born to play; his Lloyd Chasseur is a contemporary American man who’s fed up with his life and has lost the ability to care whose feelings he hurts. Spacey would later win his second Oscar playing Lester Burnham, a completely cut-loose and de-neutered version of the same character in “American Beauty.” Witness the nearly interchangeable dialogue:
“You think every morning I wake up, look in the mirror and say, ‘Gee I’m glad I’m me and not some 19-year-old billionaire rock star with the body of an athlete and a 24-hour erection!’ No I don’t! So just excuse the shit out of me!”
“I’m not a drunk, I don’t f— other women, I’ve never hit you, I don’t mistreat you… I don’t even try to touch you since you’ve made it so abundantly clear how unnecessary you consider me to be!”
His portrayal of a verbally sadistic movie producer (is there another kind?) Buddy Ackerman in writer-director George Huang’s black comedy “Swimming With Sharks,” could have merely been hilarious had Kevin Spacey not found Buddy’s humanity.
Guy (Frank Whaley) is fresh out of film school and has landed a choice job as the assistant to Buddy. Things don’t start off on the right foot when he brings Buddy Equal instead of Sweet and Low, and grow worse when Guy explains that Equal and Sweet and Low are essentially the same thing.
As I’m convinced only Spacey can, he replies that they’re not the same because one is blue and one is pink, and only a [many expletives deleted] moron would take any other position. Benicio Del Toro, as the outgoing assistant, cheerfully tells Guy not to worry, for tomorrow Buddy will surely ask for Equal and not Sweet and Low.
Buddy’s verbal abuse wears on Guy, emasculates him, but what really sets him off is when Buddy steals a project from him. Fed up, Guy kidnaps him and tortures him. The torture scenes are often the weakest scenes in the film, but Huang wisely opens the movie with one of these very scenes, which keeps the shift in tone from catching the audience off-guard.
But late in the movie, after he’s been tortured and abused, Buddy reveals something to Guy that changes the movie and shifts the balance of our empathy. Guy bellows that he’s taken Buddy’s abuse for a year, and Buddy exclaims, “I took it for ten!” Furthermore, he explains his position on the theft of the project – Guy works for Buddy, that’s it, anything Guy pursues, he’s doing it on Buddy’s behalf, and maybe it sucks, but that’s the way it is.
It doesn’t excuse Buddy’s behavior, but it adds context to his character and his treatment of Guy and gives them common ground. Is Buddy even telling the truth about his climb to the top of the Hollywood food chain? I can’t decide.
The movie ends on a false and forced note – Buddy and Guy team up to make the movie together, which seems out of character for Buddy whether his confession was genuinely real or genuine horsecrap. But the movie is worth seeing for Spacey’s performance alone, which gave a glimpse at the star he would become.
His moment of actual arrival would come in 1995, when he co-starred in “The Usual Suspects,” for which he bagged his first Academy Award. Since he became a bona fide star, perhaps his work has been inconsistent, but perhaps we are too familiar with him by now for him to continue to surprise us.
*”Swimming With Sharks” screened at the 1994 Toronto Film Festival but was not released theatrically until 1995, so yes, I’m cheating on this. Best year ever is hyperbolic nonsense, anyway, as I have explained here.
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