We love Spacey
Kevin Spacey, the everyman's man

IN A WORLD where indie's just another word for everything left to win, and particularly in a world where the San Francisco International Film Festival's all-new programming staff is suffering from what some have described as a self-imposed mandate to get cozier with Hollywood, Kevin Spacey is the perfect actor to receive the fest's annual Peter J. Owens award. Indeed, Spacey would be the perfect actor to receive an award under most any conditions: a two-time Oscar winner (for The Usual Suspects and American Beauty) and a longtime crossover darling between Indiewood and the multiplex box office, he's a gifted player of charming everymen and gnarled superkillers alike. Moreover, he's damn near huggable in all capacities – whether he's fucking with Kevin Kline's marriage in Consenting Adults and Gwyneth Paltrow's head in Seven or slumping in his seat at the breakfast table, prematurely dead in L.A. Confidential.

So if the SFIFF is intent on hugging Hollywood ever closer to its breast, then open the doors and let Spacey in. Just don't try to open the doors on the actor's private life, as Esquire notoriously attempted to do back in its October 1997 issue, when Spacey was in the midst of essaying a quasi-openly gay millionaire in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Spacey countered the magazine's insinuations that he was gay with denials and denouncements: "It's not true," he told Playboy that same year. "It's a lie." At Salon.com, which sometimes seems to double as a Spacey fan site, film critic Michael Sragow wondered two years later, "Would it matter even to the most hidebound among us if Spacey had said he were gay?" No direct answer was supplied, and shortly thereafter Spacey went on to collect his second Oscar, which, for the record, no openly gay actor has ever been awarded.

"Expansive and ironic," Sragow went on to write, "Spacey is the emblematic actor of a paradoxical age. Eloquent and elemental, he represents all the men and women who face limitless sexual, emotional and professional options – but find little wiggle-room in their careers and family life." When Sragow penned those lines, Spacey had not yet made Pay It Forward, K-Pax, or The Shipping News – three films that codify the phoned-in emotional range of the actor's post-Oscar cash-ins. More and more, Spacey's well-known affection for the late Jack Lemmon seems to be transmuted into a template for his own performances, which now tend to hew ever closer to the little-man-trampled-by-forces-both-indifferent-and-overwhelming mold. As in Lemmon's work, even Spacey's comedic characters are tragedy-bound and always seem more than slightly self-satisfied in their downward spiral. "Expansive and ironic"? Lately, Spacey's seemed like nothing so much as a deadeningly earnest and implosive star; could a remake of Days of Wine and Roses be far behind?

But why dwell on the present, where Spacey's greatest accomplishment is K-Pax's Space(y)-man, a dude who fell to Earth who has benignly come in peace (the title reads like a play on Kevin=Peace) and seems ready, given his psychological back story, to fall forever to pieces? The past is where Spacey's best work now resides, in the various shark pools of Glengarry Glen Ross (where he guts Jack Lemmon so completely that you'd think they were opposite sides in a Jaws remake), The Usual Suspects (where he claims his title as the '90s' quintessential limping genius), and L.A. Confidential – in which his chum-slickened Jack Vincennes becomes the sacrificial lamb while Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce duke it out for future Oscar domination. Compared with someone like Nicolas Cage (another Oscar winner and Peter J. Owens awardee), Spacey's never been a showboat. His idea of expressive transformation is dying his hair blond, donning an oversize pair of sunglasses, or – gasp! – eating a banana with the peel on.

Ever since he announced, in the character of American Beauty's beautiful loser, Lester Burnham, that "in a way, I'm dead already" – and then went on to let us catch him jerking off in the shower – we sensed a dimming at the end of the tunnel. Still, we love Spacey, and we hope he comes back to us soon. (Chuck Stephens)

Swimming with Sharks screens Wed/24, 7 p.m., Kabuki 8. For more information see box, page 33.