K-PAX

Once messiahs came from heaven; now — in movies, anyway — they come from outer space. Once they were crucified; now they’re committed to mental-health facilities. Like the visitor from K-PAX in the Iain Softley adaptation of the Gene Brewer novel of the same name. He calls himself prot (K-PAXians have their own rules of capitalization), and after claiming to have arrived here via a beam of light (much like the movie itself) from his planet a thousand light-years away, he’s put into the care of Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges, avuncular again) at a Manhattan psychiatric hospital. Schizophrenic delusions? Perhaps, but prot, played by Kevin Spacey at his condescending best, poses a convincing case. Not only can he see ultraviolet light and produce star maps from the point of view of his home planet, he also has a therapeutic effect on the other patients, who at his bequest chase after the Bluebird of Happiness — literally.

Powell suspects that prot’s identity is simply a way of coping with something traumatic and horrible — as are, perhaps all identities. But the crucial question of whether it makes sense to dispel the delusion, if indeed it is one, and so destroy a splendid and beneficial work of the imagination never seems to matter. Instead, K-PAX focuses on the sentimentalization of the patients, Powell’s domestic discontents, and the Oscar moment in which prot’s smugness breaks down into agony. As if Mork were to visit One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the effect is a little alienating.

— Peter Keough