“2. Swimming With Sharks” (1994)
If Spacey’s turn in this weekend’s “Horrible Bosses” seems familiar, there’s a reason for that: it’s in many ways a replay of his vicious, Machiavellian movie mogul in 1994’s indie “Swimming With Sharks,” and Spacey brings a certain star persona to the turn that Tom Cruise and Philip Seymour Hoffman (who turned the part down) might have missed. The film, by former movie studio lackey George Huang –who was encouraged to make it by his pal Robert Rodriguez — follows Guy (Frank Whaley), an aspiring screenwriter who takes a job as an assistant to studio executive Buddy Ackerman, who turns out to be virtually psychotic. Like a Tarantino version of “The Devil Wears Prada,” Guy snaps, restraining his employer, beating and torturing him. Spacey makes a tremendous, foul-mouthed villain, as he’s shown time and time again, but what elevates the performance here are the nuances: the vulnerability he shows talking about how he turned out the way he did, the subtly paternal relationship with his underlings. The film itself isn’t quite a classic: Huang’s a better writer than he is a director, and the film, a stagey two-hander, never quite feels like cinema (indeed, it was adapted for the stage in 2007 with a London run starring Kevin Spacey as Buddy and future Doctor Who Matt Smith as Guy). But Spacey really got a hell of a showcase here, and almost everything that follows can be put down to his performance.
3. “The Usual Suspects” (1995)
With four films released and a directorial debut in the can (the little-seen “Albino Alligator”) 1995 was clearly Spacey’s year and his somersault into the big leagues. We have the towering success of “The Usual Suspects” to thank for this. It was Spacey’s little film that could: Christopher McQuarrie’s potty-mouthed script and Bryan Singer’s slick direction relies on Spacey’s central performance as the mercurial Roger “Verbal” Kint to bolster their successes. Simultaneously feted as a masterpiece and dismissed as a cheap card-trick breathing down “Rashomon”’s neck since its release, whether or not you think the film’s final moments amount to nothing but a calculated rug-pulling exercise it’s plain to see that with “The Usual Suspects”, Spacey landed a hell of a role, and it’s formalized the persona he’s been trading off since the film came out. Kint is the film’s narrative lynchpin: apparently a low-rent short-con grifter and crippled patsy left for dead who – as it turns out – may or may not be an all-powerful “devil” called Keyser Söze at the head of a shady criminal underworld pulling all the strings. Spacey’s performance runs the gamut of emotions – from squirrelly yammering fidget to detached dead-eyed quasi-Machiavelli – underpinned by his laconic unassuming drawl and complemented by a subtle physical performance. Taking the hoary literary cliché of the unreliable narrator and offering it up to the audience as literal manifestations of Kint’s elaborate imagination, Spacey humanizes the calculated clever-clever impulses of McQuarrie’s hyper-real prose and seduces the viewer as ably as Kint does Chazz Palminteri. And although the National Board of Review may have awarded the film Best Acting By An Ensemble and the then-smouldering Gabriel Byrne was – to 1995 audiences – the film’s leading man, it’s Spacey that walks away with the entire movie. Spacey would also net an Oscar for his troubles and the rest, as they say, is cinematic history.
