That, too, is why Ed Harris made "Pollock." He had been told all his life that he looked a lot like Jackson Pollock, and he began looking into the man, and soon it became an obsession. He read, he studied, he painted, he imagined, he willed himself into Jackson Pollock. But the foundation of his performance was the freakish physical similarity between the two men and the confidence it instilled in Harris (who also directed).
For "The Aviator," Martin Scorsese, the great American director, pretty aggressively embraces the total look-alike approach. Leonardo DiCaprio dyes his hair black, as did the hero of the picture, Howard Hughes, and fills it with pomade so it clings to his head, gleaming brilliantly in the light. It's never tousled or Leonardo'd at all; later, after an air crash, he adds the Smilin' Jack mustache, a little ginger smudge meant to disguise a scar or, more likely, to give gravitas to a young face. It worked for Hughes, it works for DiCaprio.
Scorsese has fun letting Cate Blanchett turn herself into a dead ringer for Katharine Hepburn. Again, it helps that Hepburn's characteristics were so singular that they're easily aped (Martin Short did a very funny Kate regularly on "Saturday Night Live"), but Blanchett does more than impersonate. She's not content with the physical similarity and the dyed hair and the lockjaw speech; she fills the role and makes us feel the life under the hallmarks.
It's interesting that her performance is far more compelling than Kate Beckinsale's as Ava Gardner, another Hughes paramour. It may be that Hepburn's uniqueness was so powerful that our memories of her are more active; we recognize her instantly and Blanchett's turn recalls many happy memories. Meanwhile, Beckinsale, who doesn't look that much like Gardner (her eyes are much more intelligent; she seems smarter, less hot, less wanton, less sultry), doesn't really register, either as Gardner or as much of anything. She's just another beautiful dish in a movie full of beautiful dishes (including Jean Harlow, played by Gwen Stefani; Faith Domergue, played by Kelli Garner; and Errol Flynn, played by Jude Law).
All of this is why the Bobby Darin thing that Kevin Spacey tries is so unusual. In fact, I can't remember anything quite like it. When Dustin Hoffman appeared in Bob Fosse's movie about Lenny Bruce, he didn't look anything like Bruce and he didn't do any makeup tricks. But he had something of Bruce's energy, he was small and furtive, he was a serious actor in a serious role, he was a New York guy (at least off the New York stage, even if born in California) and he'd played the frazzled, hassled, psycho Ratso Rizzo, so he had a train of associations that brought street cred to the performance.
Spacey is eight years older than Darin was when he died, he's tall where Darin was short, he's rangy where Darin was slinky, he's all-American where Darin was New Yawk Eye-talian, and he has a small WASP nose where Darin had a dominant noble Roman proboscis. Darin moved like a dancer; Spacey moves like an actor. When Darin danced, his natural rhythm and singer's ease with music made him cool. When Spacey dances -- yes, the movie insanely allows this! -- he looks like what he is, a hapless amateur hidden among a dance line of professionals.
Wait, I just remembered something just like it, only better. It was James Cagney in "Yankee Doodle Dandy," the 1942 biopic of songwriter-showman George M. Cohan. Cagney didn't look anything like Cohan. But to those of us who watched the movie on our bellies in the "recreation rooms" of our split levels amid Danish modern furniture of the '50s, it didn't matter, not merely because we were so young but because Cohan's fame was theatrical in the era before mass media; he was a famous star whom, basically, only a tiny number of New Yorkers had seen. Cagney was the great Cagney, and he had that unique "stiff-legged" jauntiness to his dance step.
But, now that I think about it, Cagney was different from Spacey, in that before he became an actor he was an authentic Irish song-and-dance man, just as was Cohan. Spacey was a stand-up comedian.
None of Spacey's gifts matches up with Darin's. Spacey has an extraordinary verbal facility and can speak faster, clearer, more convincingly than any American in movies, and that's what's so mesmerizing about him, as in the spectacular "The Usual Suspects." Darin kind of spat his words out of the corner of his mouth, his upper lip curled in a perpetual hep-cat snarl. I remember him best in a comic role in the Don Siegel film "Hell Is for Heroes" (1962), where he's the scroungy Army wheeler-dealer who can get you ciggies or perfume or wine in exchange for a few bucks. His amusing rattiness is what makes the performance work, especially in contrast to Steve McQueen's total chill as a nihilistic ex-sergeant whose will to self-destruction carries a poorly led platoon to its own obliteration (very cool movie, by the way).
So when Spacey tries to be Bobby Darin, for me it does not work. Not even a little. It reminds me of a peculiar comedy of the '70s called "Matilda," about a boxing kangaroo. The kangaroo was played by a guy in a kangaroo suit. Not only that, it was a bad kangaroo suit. The illusion just never took over, and the movie is remembered today -- if it is remembered at all -- as one of the larger miscalculations this side of "Ishtar."
So to me "Beyond the Sea" is a "Matilda" about Bobby Darin. But then I have heard that there are about 2.5 billion people on Earth who are younger than me, although I don't believe I have ever actually noticed one. It's quite possible, at least theoretically, that they will enjoy the film as a lighthearted tribute to someone they never heard of. Spacey sounds enough like the old records, and he's mastered some of the microphone moves.
But here's a question: If Spacey doesn't look anything like Darin, then why does Kate Bosworth, who plays Darin's long-suffering first wife, the actress Sandra Dee, look so much like Sandra Dee? Are we in a universe of look-alikes or not? Can the look-alike and non-look-alike school of biopic be so casually combined? Or am I thinking too hard about this?
