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So this maybe-alien story ends with the filmmakers refusing to wrap things up in a tidy little package and answering all your questions. Ambiguity reigns.
It's deliberate provocation that is both comforting and stimulating, especially when many major studio pictures spell out everything in such hackneyed ways that we realize they think we're all stupid or lazy.
K-PAX, which was adapted from the Gene Brewer novel by Charles Leavitt (who also wrote The Mighty) and directed by thoughtful Englishman Iain Softley (the riveting and sexy Henry James opus The Wings Of The Dove), is sophisticated. Both lead actors, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges, are allowed to take risks, push boundaries and play scenes with a delicate subtlety that occasionally veers toward the profound.
Spacey plays an apparently homeless man who is discovered wandering through Grand Central Station in Manhattan. After he tells authorities that he is an alien visitor named Prot who hails from the distant planet K-PAX, he is taken into custody and handed over to a psychiatrist in the mental ward of a run-down New York hospital. With his eerily quiet manner and absolute command of his own truth -- with bursts of super-intelligence that suggest an idiot savant -- Spacey's character begins to profoundly affect everyone in his orbit.
Bridges, who once played an alien visitor himself in the delightful 1984 movie Starman, plays the cynical shrink who is determined to find out what horrible secrets Spacey is hiding that would have inspired his delusion.
As his sessions with Spacey get more and more spacey, Bridges' veneer begins to flake off and his own vulnerability is revealed. As he faces his own demons, he comes to grips with problems in his family life with his wife and children.
Meanwhile, the other patients in the mental ward -- a motley yet sympathetic gang of eccentrics who recall the folks in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest -- believe in Spacey's elaborate tale. Strangely, he has a healing effect on many of them, to the astonishment of Bridges and the other medical experts.
As an idea, K-PAX is sheer bravado, a smart metaphor for exploring questions about humanity. It is a fable with sci-fi overtones yet deep roots in Mother Earth and our true nature.
As a movie, however, K-PAX goes a little wonky in the mushy middle-end segments, especially when Bridges takes Spacey into a series of regressive hypnosis sessions. These seem cartoonish and unconvincing on screen. The story gets more distracting than absorbing, and it becomes hard to suspend disbelief.
For all its problems in telling the tale, however, K-PAX is always a marvellous showcase for Spacey and Bridges, as well as its sterling support cast that includes Alfre Woodard, Mary McCormack and Conchata Ferrell.
And when it ends, there is a fascinating close-up on Bridges and Spacey that makes it all worthwhile. There is more than meets the eye here.
(This film is rated AA)