April 28, 2000 | Kevin Spacey strolls into The Big Kahuna with so much cocksure swagger, you might think he’s been typecast in the title role. But don’t jump to conclusions: He may have enough off-screen clout to have gotten this indie movie made, but he isn’t trying to cruise along in a star vehicle.
Spacey plays Larry, a glad-handing marketing rep for an industrial-lubricants firm. During a convention in Wichita, which he finds only slightly less tolerable than Purgatory, Larry operates a hospitality suite with two colleagues – Phil (Danny DeVito), a long-time friend and fellow road warrior, and Bob (Peter Facinelli), a fresh-faced new employee – who are supposed to help him curry the favor of an important business executive. (Yes, you guessed it: This potential client is the real “Big Kahuna.”) Not surprisingly, things don’t go according to plan.
Sometimes profanely funny, sometimes intensely dramatic, The Big Kahuna is a richly amusing and provocatively insightful film that builds to a profoundly powerful cumulative impact. What begins as a conventional satire of salesmanship and American Dreaming gradually evolves into something appreciably deeper, as characters talk about faith, friendship and nagging fears about meaning and meaninglessness.
Bob, a born-again Christian, assumes he has all the answers. Larry is amazed and enraged when he finds his younger colleague has been talking about religion, not business, with the Big Kahuna. The older and wiser Phil delicately questions whether pushing Jesus isn’t just as dishonest as other hard-sell techniques.
Spacey comes across as a live wire charged by alternating currents of cynicism and desperation, turning from sardonic wit to savage fury in the space of an anxious heartbeat. (A nice touch: During Larry’s moments of fever-pitch fretfulness, Spacey appears to channel his friend and mentor, Jack Lemmon.) DeVito is every bit as terrific, if not slightly better, affectingly underplaying Phil as someone who’s wistfully aware that his hard-won wisdom is a result of having had to learn from mistakes. Facinelli does a fine job of tempering the arrogance of youth with the sincerity of a true believer.
Screenwriter Roger Rueff adapted The Big Kahuna from his own play, and he obviously doesn’t care if we know this. Indeed, he has done next to nothing to “open up” the material, preferring to remain inside the hospitality suite for virtually the entire movie. Rueff covers familiar ground here, but he mines the territory for fresh insights, and takes some intriguing detours along the way.
Just as important, Rueff gives everyone a fair chance to make his case, and refuses to score easy laughs with cheap shots. The three characters are fraught with symbolic weight – early on, you grasp that each guy represents a progressive step in the same direction, or a different stage in the same life – but they are written and played with enough passion to emerge as flesh-and-blood individuals, not metaphorical devices.
First-time filmmaker John Swanbeck employs a variety of visual stratagems to indicate tonal and emotional shifts within the claustrophobic setting. Even so, Swanbeck – who previously directed Kahuna for the stage, with other actors – has too much faith in the script, and too much respect for his cast, to needlessly complicate things with superfluous “cinematic” flourishes. Gradually, in the manner of someone slowly opening a door to admit daylight into a pitch-dark room, he unveils the insecurity beneath the bluster, the calculation behind the innocence, the verities beyond the uncertainties.
The beauty part is, The Big Kahuna doesn’t need any flash and filigree to sell these revelations as the stuff of compelling drama. Even in this era of computer-generated spectacle, the most impressive special effect that any movie can offer is a glimpse inside the human soul.
