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Movie Review
"Stigmata"
A damp, shallow thriller gives that old-time religion the MTV treatment.
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
[09/10/99]

Movie Interview
Arabian knights
"West Beirut" director Ziad Douieri talks about growing up in the crossfire of a raging civil war and raging hormones.
By Cynthia Joyce
[09/09/99]

Movie Review
"West Beirut"
Tarantino cameraman Ziad Doueiri's excellent directorial debut tracks teenagers coming of age in a sophisticated city devastated by war.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[09/09/99]

Millennial Brigadoon
The annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert invents a hyper-real space, a republic of drugs, nudity and spectacle.
By Michelle Goldberg
[09/08/99]

Column
Sidekick no more
Conan O'Brien sidekick Andy Richter was the biggest star on "Late Night." So what took him so long to leave?
By Sarah Vowell
[09/08/99]

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Watching the Profitt episodes again, I was amazed at their audacity and accomplishment -- and astonished that no one has rebroadcast them or reissued them commercially on videotape. Profitt is a world-class criminal on the order of James Bond's Blofeld. He's jumped from drug smuggling to arms sales, and is flush enough to bid for anything from a baseball team to a banana republic. But Profitt is most fascinating as a basket case study. He loves his partner and sister, Susan (Joan Severance), not fraternally but incestuously. As youngsters, the two of them killed their foster brother before he could snitch on them for smooching. As adults, their most intimate moments come when Susan injects a heroin-amphetamine mix between his toes. Mel likes to flex his naked, fetishized digits and murmur, "Only the toes knows."

These "Wiseguy" episodes get at the connection between decadence and pessimism. Mel isn't just a mammoth manic-depressive but a gangster king with a philosopher hero: Thomas Malthus, the British economist who argued in 1798 that population increases geometrically and the food supply arithmetically, with only war, plague and famine holding the two in check. The world is on a death spiral -- and so, we discover, is Mel. When Susan falls for the series' title character (played by Ken Wahl), an undercover agent for the Organized Crime Bureau, Mel begins his descent. He comes to the end of the line when a rival undercover agent uses Mel's bust of Malthus to smash a crystal that Mel believes contains his soul. "Cunnilingus and psychiatry" may have brought TV's current favorite crime family, "The Sopranos," to the brink of disaster, but voodoo, Malthus and incest plunge the Profitts into the abyss.

TV-watchers had never seen anything like Spacey's Profitt. Whether he was being an ogre or a charismatic prodigy, there was something odd about his boyish good looks. The face was round and babyish yet also prematurely jowly and creased; the hair was too shaped to seem natural, too thin to seem fake; the eyes glared like floodlights out of sleepy hollows. His flesh registered as a pliable mask, contorting this way and that. Spacey was as malleable in this series as Jim Carrey in "The Mask" -- and the saga of Susan and Mel could have been called "Smart and Smarter." One moment Mel was ripping into an uproarious imitation of Brando's Don Corleone, the next he was preaching like an existential Elmer Gantry. Spacey never cheated on the character's core emotions, no matter how complex or elusive. When Mel relaxed in his sister's arms, Spacey registered sick bliss and heart-piercing mortification. The ravages that Susan's "straying" worked on her brother's psyche made for a bizarrely poignant spectacle.

Unlike the late Ray Sharkey, who starred as a Mafia boss in the series' electrifying first arc, Spacey didn't receive the awards he deserved for "Wiseguy." But Cannell cast him again, this time in a creepy episode of the short-lived 1989 series "Unsub," which watched the FBI track serial killers. In under 52 minutes Spacey created a more rending bifurcated character than Jeremy Irons did in the frigid two hours of David Cronenberg's overrated art thing, "Dead Ringers." Director Philip Kaufman saw the "Unsub" episode and cast him in "Henry and June." British actor Richard E. Grant's collection of film diaries, "With Nails," contains one of the few printed records we have of Spacey at that time. Grant depicts Spacey on a day off from Kaufman's set in France, "on a rant because he didn't get any close-ups during his scene and has been in heated consultation with his agent and his manager. The irony is that he is playing a man who is ferociously frustrated with his artistic lot in life."

Spacey had already done Jamie Tyrone in Jonathan Miller's stage and TV production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night," starring Jack Lemmon; he was ravenous for commensurate roles on the big screen. But aside from "Henry and June," all he got were pale offshoots of previous work: another villainous partnership with Joan Severance in a terrible Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder comic caper movie, "See No Evil, Hear No Evil," and another outing with Lemmon on a tearjerker called "Dad" (both 1989). Returning to the stage, he won a Tony for playing Uncle Louie in Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers" -- but Richard Dreyfuss took the part for the movie.

Then came "Consenting Adults," a critical and financial flop that Spacey credits as his blast-off because he got to play a lead. With his hair dyed a shocking blond and his body (for once) in fighting trim, he's a suitably slippery hustler. But the movie is klutzy. Kline is supposed to be so hungry for Spacey's wife that he doesn't notice who really makes love to him in her bed. (Spacey engineers a switcheroo.) Even psychologically, Kline is too easy a lay.

"Glengarry Glen Ross" (later in 1992) should have been a step forward for Spacey. It was an all-star version of David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play about real-estate salesmen who put the screws on hapless marks in order to keep their ugly jobs. As the hollow-man office manager who is more dangerous than he looks, Spacey plants a daringly long fuse and ignites it with the smallest flicker. But the film hammers away so relentlessly at the plot that you feel it pounding at the back of your skull; few showed up to take the punishment.

Nor did moviegoers swarm to 1994's "The Ref," in which Spacey and Judy Davis play unhappy upper-middle-class marrieds. It was like a dry run for "American Beauty," with the sitcom underpinnings hopelessly exposed. After a vicious dynamite start, Davis and Spacey become little more than foils to Denis Leary as a well-meaning thief who jolts them back to their senses when he hides out in their suburban estate on Christmas Eve. No wonder Spacey tried to take matters into his own hand by co-producing the 1994 Hollywood exposé "Swimming With Sharks." Unfortunately, this black-hearted spoof of high-powered executives is not about sharks so much as a worm (Frank Whaley) working for a snake (Spacey). Spacey's snakiness is so much zestier than Whaley's worminess that the satire gets skewed.

Next page | Spacey earns his Oscar