K-Pax

I've been meaning to see K-Pax, a film with Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges, since it first came out. It's ostensibly based on a novel, but the parallels between K-Pax and Man Facing Southeast are unavoidable, although apparently legal action was dropped.

Man Facing Southeast is an Argentinian film from 1986, and I saw it for the first time a few years later. Wow, 25 years old now. The story in both is that a man in a mental institution claims to be an alien, despite being completely human. No laser, no special powers, maybe a little off the charts, but no obvious signs of being an alien. In both, the man is exceptionally intelligent and a polymath.

In both films, the alien (Prot in K-Pax, Rantes in Man Facing Southeast) spends his time in the mental institution performing miraculous (but not scientifically impossible) interventions with patients while showing talent in art, science, and math far beyond what would be normal. In both, the psychiatrist in charge is intrigued enough to get personally involved.

While Man Facing Southeast leave the ambiguity in place, K-Pax attempts to reconcile the ambiguity with an obvious and trite explanation, which leads to a personal reconciliation for Bridges' character and his son. Bridges and Spacey are charismatic actors, but the last part of the film gets tiring and has what amounts to a boring and indefensible climax/conclusion. It was as though the writer could make up his mind about the central plot point, so produced two endings and interleaved them.

There is an explanation for this. One of South America's strongest literary traditions is magic realism, which is similar to science fiction and fantasy, but not quite the same. In books by Borges or Marquez, the world is altered to account for something exceptional and inexplicable. No justification or explanation is offered. In the US, we have a strong sci-fi/fantasy tradition, but it has to be explained: think about X-Men or Heroes, in which superpowers are explained in evolutionary terms.

Man Facing Southeast doesn't directly address the tension of the is-he/isn't-he question. We're intentionally left unsatisfied, because in reality, any satisfying answer would act as a trick ending to be guessed. Think The Sixth Sense, which worked well, but made every subsequent film by Shyamalam a guessing game and a yawner.

What could I have done differently? I could have rewatched Man Facing Southeast, or just watched a different movie altogether. Still, I'm glad that I watched it; Bridges and Spacey are great actors; although their chemistry in this film was not ideal, they were still fun to watch. I could also have accepted what I knew would be true, which is that K-Pax would explain itself to us and answer any question it proposed. It's not a painful thing to do if you are anticipating it, and if you aren't holding the film up to the unrealistic measure of a very artistic that was an exceptional success (artistically) and a personal favorite. The similarities may be too striking to discount, but they didn't have to make the experience painful. I often find myself not having fun at my own expense (in situations like these); no one wins, and I end up losing. I know that this is shocking if you know me, but I think I might be able to periodically overthink things a bit. Just a bit.