Yow. I liked it more than I usually like Fincher’s stuff, but watching it eight years after it came out, I couldn’t stop thinking about how overrated Spacey is as an actor — and Brad Pitt too, actually, but in different ways. Now, don’t open Outlook yet; let me finish. In my thumbnail of The Man Who Wasn’t There, I talked about my understanding of range, and Brad Pitt fits into the “Type I” definition; he can play almost any role believably, but within the role, he’s not doing much — at least, not much you haven’t seen him do before. You watch enough Brad Pitt movies and you see him taking certain tic-y shortcuts over and over, although he’s such a likable actor that I suspect we choose to overlook it — and I say this from the perspective of not finding him scorching hot. He’s just very mellow and cool-seeming, and I think a lot of people mistake that for outsized talent when it’s actually an almost pheromonal ability to get the audience, male and female, to like him and want to hang out with him. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

But when you contrast Pitt with Spacey, oddly enough, Pitt wins. Initially, Spacey seems like a “Type II Range” actor — you can’t cast him in that wide a variety of stuff (and I really wish Hollywood would acknowledge that already), but he does good work within a narrow range…or so you’d think, but he’s not actually doing much work at all. When he first came on the scene in a big way with Se7en and The Usual Suspects, I think he fooled a lot of people, because we hadn’t seen anyone quite like him before; he has a certain diction and bites off his lines in a certain way that’s unique. But “unique” doesn’t necessarily mean “good.” Spacey is even more tic-y than Pitt, but in a showy, self-aware, actor-y way that’s getting progressively more annoying to watch the more he gets crammed into leading-man roles that he’s not quite right for. The five other people who had the misfortune to sit through K-Pax can back me up on that — his performance in that is a combination of watered-down Starman (and that has to have grated on Jeff Bridges, his co-star) and his usual brand of “unblinking stare = emotional nudity” acting. I don’t dislike Spacey especially, and I fell for his line too; I loved him in The Usual Suspects. Everyone did. He’s not a bad actor, but he’s only got a couple of notes, and now that we’ve heard them both, I don’t think he’s getting another Oscar.

Anyway. It’s a good flick — I knew the basic premise, so it was more a matter of seeing how it would unfold, and it didn’t disappoint. That scene when the shooting starts in the hall is a startler, although I think Fincher relied too heavily on smash cuts as it unfolded — and what is with Fincher’s obsession with grimy sets? Yeah. We get it, Dave. Enough with the mildew.

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