Kevin Spacey Very Convincingly Plays a Horrible Boss in the Cult 1994 Show Biz Dark Comedy Swimming With Sharks
Horrible Bosses wasn’t just the name of a hit movie Kevin Spacey co-starred in. It’s also a succinct and fairly accurate description of Spacey’s type. Spacey is brilliant at playing Machiavellian schemers and malevolent authority figures. He’s a natural-born villain. He even manages to be sinister and vaguely ominous when playing a billionaire who learns life lessons after being turned into a kitty cat in Nine Lives.
But after he won the Academy Award for most acting in American Beauty, Spacey didn’t really want to play the bad guy anymore. He wanted to be the good guy. That tends to pay better and get better billing, and Spacey seems like a man ruled by an ego that’s sizable even for an actor. Spacey may see himself as Superman but the world looks at him and sees Lex Luthor, a role he actually played in the widely forgotten Superman Returns. That’s a film that received such a sleepy reception that you almost want to answer its title with, “But does he really?”
When Spacey received the kind of reviews every actor prays for in 1994’s Swimming with Sharks he was already an established film, stage and television actor, with credits like Glengarry Glen Ross, Henry & June and See No Evil, Hear No Evil. But Swimming with Sharks, along with The Usual Suspects, Se7en and L.A. Confidential catapulted Spacey onto the A-list before American Beauty very briefly threatened to turn him into a huge movie star but instead led to years in the wilderness before his Horrible Bosses/House of Cards comeback.
Swimming with Sharks did great things for Spacey and relatively little for everyone else involved. He’s not the protagonist, but there’s a reason I’m writing about Swimming with Sharks as a Kevin Spacey movie and not a Frank Whaley vehicle or a George Huang directorial effort. That seems appropriate, since Spacey’s ferocious performance is all that elevates Swimming with Sharks above typical navel-gazing semi-autobiographical dross about how the movie industry is mean to earnest young men who just want to make movies, man.
Spacey is perfectly typecast as Buddy Ackerman, a cold-blooded corporate shark and studio executive whose assistants are invariably rewarded with cushy, high-paying jobs if they can survive the never-ending gauntlet of insults and abuse Buddy heaps upon them. Buddy dangles the carrot of professional success above Guy’s head when he needs to, but mostly he’s all about whacking his hapless would-be protege with a stick as hard and as frequently as possible for an endless series of mistakes, real or imagined.
A miscast and overwhelmed Frank Whaley stars as Guy, Buddy’s latest and most unfortunate assistant, a recent film school graduate with a big brain swimming with optimism and big ideas about all the meaningful, substantive movies he’s going to make. Buddy makes it clear upfront that he sees his new slave as nothing more than an unthinking automaton whose sole reason for living is to do his bidding, but Guy is such a wide-eyed, oblivious dope that he seems to think his boss’ clear-cut hatred of him is a mere misunderstanding he can resolve with a heart-to-heart conversation.
Guy is, in other word, such an oblivious dope that it’s nearly impossible to buy that someone like Buddy would hire him in the first place, let alone let him hold onto his job for months. Whaley can be a great character actor. Hell, he’s got a permanent place in film history as Brad with the big brain in Pulp Fiction but as a leading man, his type is “Schmuck.” And hoo boy is Guy ever a schmuck.
As befits a movie-mad movie that came out in a year utterly dominated by Pulp Fiction (a slightly better Whaley film), Swimming with Sharks has a split timeline that switches back and forth between Buddy enjoyably tormenting his hapless, bumbling assistant with a never-ending blast of verbose vitriol and a fed-up Guy physically torturing his boss for stealing his girlfriend, his ideas and his words and also for being the worst human being in the world, and consequently a slightly worse-than-average Hollywood player.
Whaley has the misfortune to look like a human-sized Keebler elf, or, alternately, a statue of the Big Boy chain’s grinning, pompadour-sporting mascot come to life. He’s lilliputian in size and, despite his terrific turn later in Vacancy, he’s about as intimidating and scary as a Golden Retriever puppy.
Whaley’s elfin presence wouldn’t be such a problem if he didn’t spend much of the film enacting some of the least plausible revenge ever committed to film. Whaley simply doesn’t seem large enough to menace a guy like Spacey. Watching Whaley physically torment Spacey is like watching a leprechaun beat up Mike Tyson.
We aren’t necessarily supposed to like Guy. He does, after all, spend much of the film torturing a man. But we’re at least supposed to feel his pain. Guy doesn’t need to be likable, necessarily, but he needs to interesting, compelling and plausible. Guy needs to be, if not an equal adversary to Buddy, then at least a worthy adversary. He’s not.
Swimming with Sharks is the kind of film that has Buddy railing against Guy as representative of the “MTV, microwave generation” as if either MTV or microwaves were signifiers of youth, hipness or glibness in 1994. He might as well be ranting to Guy about “You kids, and your color TVs and air-conditioners! Everything comes easy to you!”
Even Spacey, in his element and in one of his best roles, if not one of his better films, can’t really sell a line that clumsy and tone-deaf, but he works wonders with dialogue that only feels remotely natural when Spacey is delivering it, and even then, the roaring theatricality of Spacey’s performance, the unabashed bigness, is what makes it so enjoyable.
Spacey isn’t the only cast member of Swimming with Sharks who was destined for bigger and better things, including Academy Awards. A young, pre-stardom Benicio Del Toro quietly steals every scene he’s in as the man Guy is replacing, a preternaturally savvy player adept at managing his boss’ moods and navigating the rocky terrain of show-business. Del Toro’s character would be a worthy foe for Guy; he’s just as sharp and just as calculating but in a more subtle, understated way.
Within the pantheon of Kevin Spacey jerk movies and movies about tyrannical show-business bosses who may or may not be based on Joel Silver and/or Scott Rudin, Swimming with Sharks occupies a privileged place. But twenty-three years later, the movie is remembered almost exclusively for Spacey’s performance.
In Swimming with Sharks, Spacey is great at being bad, but not even a show-business villain for the ages can redeem this leaden melodrama/dark comedy.
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