Rebirth of the salesman

Wiseguy: Kevin Spacey in The Big Kahuna

10 April 2012

The Big Kahuna belongs to the same mini-genre as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. All three are plays about salesmen that have been adapted - with greater or lesser success - for the screen.

In Britain, the salesman is not exactly a marginal figure, but he lacks the totemic significance that he possesses in the US, where an untrammelled enthusiasm for unbridled capitalist enterprise has transformed him into a hieratic figure.

With ballyhoo and bunkum flowing in the lifeblood of the Heartland, it's fair to say that America is as much a nation of salesmen as Britain is one of shopkeepers.

But, whereas Miller's Willie Loman was at once an everyman and an innocent, whose suicide represented the death of the Leftist values that Miller embraced, and the real-estate shysters that Mamet portrayed were the counterpart of the pump-primed, Savings-and-Loans boom of the Reagan era, the three salesmen in The Big Kahuna are curiously decoupled from the contemporary era.

Adapted by Roger Rueff from his own play, Hospitality Suite, the action of The Big Kahuna (which, should you be wondering, is Hawaiian surfing slang for a grande fromage) takes place at a sales convention in a Wichita hotel.

Three disparate salesmen have flown in from their corporate HQ in Chicago. Phil (Danny DeVito) is the most Lomanesque of the three, a decent man, worn out by depression, a divorce and the exigencies of flogging industrial lubricants. Bob (Peter Facinelli), is a fresh-faced youngster, whose religious faith shines through every shiny pore of his squeakyclean visage. Larry (Kevin Spacey) is the malcontent, an acerbic wiseacre whose determination to nail the big kahuna of the title and make that sale is a function not of belief but abiding cynicism.

Over a long day and a still longer night, these three men revolve around a 16th-floor hospitality suite, through the vertical textured louvres of which we are served up unprepossessing slices of the urban Midwest.

They first prepare for their potential pitches, then entertain them, and finally anatomise themselves amid the detritus of overflowing ashtrays and stained highball glasses.

Barring a trip to the bar to buy cigarettes and a stroll along a darkened street, we're as confined to the suite as the protagonists. Banged up with the appalling wallpaper which flows over horizontal and vertical surfaces alike, forced to contemplate the amazingly dreadful fake grate with its cosmetic logs, driven to regard the job-lot prints of fly fishing.

In short, we, too, are checked in to a characterless hotel in an anonymous city, and such a Kafka-esque predicament forces us ineluctably to seek the eternal verities about sex, death and God.

There's always something nicely contrary about confining the action of a film to a single interior, but with a screen adaptation of a stage play you never feel that this is a directorial decision (unlike, say, Von Trier's Dogville), it's merely a function of a crude transposition.

John Swanbeck's direction is workmanlike; there are no surprising angles or interesting shots, the claustrophobia of the setting is neither enhanced nor played down. Everything about this film forces you to pay attention to the actors and the dialogue.

For the first 40 minutes, this was just fine. DeVito, resting his hairy beach ball of a body on a sofa, smoking and flipping through Penthouse, delivers pithy one-liner after pithy one-liner. He's a credible enough salesman, if endowed with rather better dialogue than most. He establishes his Phil and makes us warm to him; Phil, we gather as he discourses on character and fate, is really short for "philosopher". DeVito plays Plato, and Facinelli is his pupil-cum-foil.

To begin with, Larry's irruption into this pacific scene has a certain tension and brio. Spacey is an actor who makes an immediate impact on the screen - nervy yet feline, his body an animate insinuation.

In the lift he drops his gum in the condiments en route for some other hospitality suite, but this is his last act of true rebellion. Indeed, despite the coiled energy Spacey brings to his part, when Phil enters the suite, the dramatic tension of The Big Kahuna begins to leak away.

It doesn't matter how much he pirouettes, paces, prowls and postures, there's something just a tad too effete about Spacey's performance to make Larry as dangerous a presence as he needs to be. There is this weakness and there's the overall staginess of the film. Plays can get away with unrealistic dialogue because the medium itself requires suspension of disbelief; film demands greater naturalism, ums, ers, nonce phrases and longueurs, but The Big Kahuna has none of these.

Instead, the characters rapidly become mouthpieces for well-phrased disquisitions on friendship, morality and life in general. Some of these are quite good, but I'd as soon read them in a self-help manual, as see them dramatised. The message of The Big Kahuna - that proselytising Christianity is just another form of salesmanship - is slight when you consider what awful havoc Christian fundamentalism is wreaking on the American body politic right now.

Spacey produced The Big Kahuna under the aegis of his Trigger Street outfit, and we should be grateful to him for trying to make a sincere, small-scale picture like this. He also appeared in the 1992 film of Mamet's play, but when I think what iniquities the American sales culture is currently unleashing on the world, The Big Kahuna looks like an anodyne excursion rather than a significant addition to the mini-genre.

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