Gay Today: Entertainment

The Big Kahuna

Film Review by Warren Arronchic

Peter Facinelli (left) and 1999 Best Actor winner Kevin Spacey star in The Big Kahuna

I like 'reality bite' films, especially those which focus on the dissatisfactions men are likely to experience living in our topsy-turvy culture. Fight Club was one such film, albeit more action-packed than is The Big Kahuna.

First written for the stage by Roger Rueff and titled Hospitality Suite, The Big Kahuna seldom moves, during its perfectly-timed 90-minute run, farther afield than its setting in a Wichita, Kansas hotel room. Its dialogue is chock full of insights that remind us how the examined life is most worth living.

The two startlingly effective actors who do this reminding are Kevin Spacey (Larry) and Danny DeVito (Phil) both businessmen—salesmen-- who've been around the block a time or two, while Bob (played by Peter Facinelli) is a new-comer: newly married, idealistic, and religious. Bob hasn't yet discovered the things that Larry and Phil know instinctively and he's puzzled and unsettled by their revelatory confessions about the failures, disappointments and disillusions they've known.

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Kevin Spacey's talents as an actor continue, in this film, to bedazzle his fans. Spacey's a master of entrances and exits. When he walks into the hotel suite, he commands one's full attention. When he speaks or smiles, he becomes a magnet. His voice is imbued with a strange power that grips even the most inattentive of listeners. His disillusionment strikes deep.

This is a story that asks basic philosophical questions: Who am I? What am I really doing? What do I really believe? These queries are posed with an urgency and a passion that have seldom been matched in dramatic dialogues. Bob, new to philosophy, can only wonder at how his older comrades can speak about sex, disappointment, and questionable business deals with so little embarrassment.

The Big Kahuna is tailor-made for its actors, in this case three of the finest that could be found. Spacey's character lets us see yet another dimension of his tough-guy persona. Underneath his cutting, wise-assed macho boasts, he's clearly a bundle of nerves.

Danny Devito plays Phil in The Big Kahuna

DeVito is smart, savvy, but world weary. The younger, know-it-all Facinelli—who really wants to sell Jesus--and whose religious assurances make him disgustingly judgmental, is, at first, too easy to detest. Each of these men, however, are OK guys in their varied ways, struggling to keep afloat among dubious satisfactions that are hard to come by in most business circles.

Their task is to win the affection of a big-time CEO—the Kahuna—who, hopefully, when he arrives, will find them, as industrial lubricant salesmen, worthy of his award--a contract. Mirrors and dream states provide effective methodologies that show up the salesmen's worrisome thoughts, adding poignancy to their struggles toward finding their inmost selves.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Kevin Spacey's acting is his use of his eyes. I'd felt this way about him previously in American Beauty, especially while he watched his intended teen-queen ice-skater. But in The Big Kahuna, he hardly needs to speak, so forcefully do his eyes tell the gist of what he thinks.

What is this film really saying? Bob's character provides the annoying catalyst for its messages. His youthful naivete and his overgrown assurances need the challenges of the older men's real world-think to whisk him away from his imaginary status quo. Larry and Phil are fully up to the task of wising him up. The Big Kahuna shows Bob's smugness running smack into a brick wall. Notions that know-it-all youths cling to get scattered to the four winds.

If you're likely to be attracted to smart, sassy dialogues that delve into the current deeps of conventional male anxieties, The Big Kahuna is a must-see. It has that special flair that turns the often-pitiful struggles of many modern men into an enlightenment for others.