AMERICAN PSYCHO
Ironically, filmed in Canada

  Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho was one of those love-it-or-hate-it books which I always seem to find myself straddling the fence on, which might explain why my jeans keep ripping in the crotch.  It had its moments of power, and the stream-of-consciousness fixation on fashion and ludicrously extravagant lunch bills were gave it as disorienting a look into a madman's head as most any I've read; and besides, no matter how repelled you were by its scenes of way-beyond-ghastly violence, admit it, you ran out the next day and told all your friends about it in loving detail.  But it kind of jumped up and down in one spot, making its point with jackhammer-like repetitiveness (I've heard that a lot of Ellis' books do this; this is the only one I've read), and I couldn't help but feel that the violence was a gimmick stuck with Elmer's Glue onto a spotty work with a lot of good ideas which might not otherwise have reached the audience this one did.

That having been said, director/cowriter Mary Harron's adaptation (coscripted with Guinevere Turner, who gets a cameo and is pretty hot) of the novel, by cinematic necessity, excises much of what would have made the book unfilmable in other hands.  Though much of the book's more powerful aspects are left out, its black humor remains intact, and in the hands of the Harron and the actors, it makes for a film that's interesting far more often than not.

Christian Bale (in a role that almost, but thankfully didn't, go to Leonardo DiCaprio) plays Patrick Bateman, a 27-year-old VP of a Wall Street firm in the late 1980's who specializes in mergers and acquisitions (or, as he half-jokingly calls it later on, murders and executions).  As he tells us in voiceover, he has all the biological characteristics of a human being, but deep down inside, he's missing anything remotely connected with humanity.  The only emotions he experiences are greed and disgust.  So we see Patrick in his home, at the office, and in the social life in which he presents a condescending façade of liberal humanism, and through voiceovers and his actions, we get to see what kind of a guy he really is.  There isn't much plot here, folks; just a camera following this guy through several months of his life as he does his thing and slowly slips into a state of half-reality where he doesn't know what's real anymore and even his own lawyer doesn't know who he is.

Bale has been almost unanimously declared the strongest thing about this movie by just about everybody, and I'm more than happy to join in on the chorus.  He calmly talks of his emptiness and inhumanity, but talks of it the right way; instead of whining about it, he speaks of it as if he were describing the weather.  There are moments of enthusiasm, but just because they're because of vanity or envy doesn't humanize him much further.  Actually, his best moment is his priceless facial expression when one man takes his attempt to murder him as much-welcomed homosexual romantic advance.  I haven't seen fear like that since the French-cookin' Iron Chef was challenged to that Girls' Festival cook-off.

Bateman's apartment is just as devoid of humanity; everything is done in black and white, and his CD collection (which he describes in great detail, though curiously in a different order than in the book, as a prelude to sex and/or murder) is loaded with soulless corporate pop (Phil Collins, Whitney Houston).  At one point, lying to a detective, he says he doesn't listen to Huey Lewis & The News because they sound "too black".  (I admit; I grew up on Huey Lewis, and was a big fan as a kid, though I haven't listened to them in a long time and can't imagine what they could do to rekindle my interest today.  Not that it matters, since they have somehow managed to put out albums of retrospectives and cover songs throughout the past decade, never breaking up, but still haven't released a new song in ten years.) Porno movies and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre play in the background of his apartment without him actually noticing them, as if they were the background music in his head.

The people he associates with don't invite much sympathy; his co-workers are largely identical to him, though without the serial killing (Bateman is even routinely mistaken for someone else at the office). Included among his co-workers is Jared Leto, who's making a career for himself by making the audience beg in each film for him to die.  These co-workers are all engaged in an ongoing contest of materialist one-upmanship; comparing apartments, business cards, ease with which they can secure restaurant reservations, you name it.  Bateman is crushed every time it looks like somebody's pulling ahead of him (come to think of it, every time something of his is compared to something of someone else's, he comes up short).  His fiance (Reese Witherspoon) is a total personality-vacuum society-page chick (damn shame that the "urinal cake" scene from the book isn't here).  The drug-addled woman he's having an affair with (Samantha Mathis, who surely by design has never looked worse) always seems like she's about to cry about something, and his secretary (Chloe Sevigny) is in love with him because...so far as I can tell, because he's rich.  All the women are pretty much wasted in their roles (take that as you will); Bateman's world is one where women are there to service him, to the last.

As I said, the big hook of the novel was the extreme and graphic descriptions of its violence (sex this graphic can be found as easily in any issue of Penthouse Forum).  This being a movie, things are much more muted in the bloodletting; there's a lot of blood by movie standards, but there's not a lot of on-screen violence, and it's certainly light n' fluffy compared to that of the book.  The most shocking moment of violence is committed, unseen, against a dog; I know, it's silly, but you can probably all imagine what I'm talking about when I say that the collective wince/cringe from the audience was stronger during this than in any violence perpetrated against a human.  I'm guilty of this too.  Poor puppy.

Curiously, what caused the MPAA to demand cuts was a scene of three-way sex, go figure.  (Here in Canada, we got the uncut version.)  Some wiseass lawyer (are there still people who wonder why everybody hates lawyers?) even made a national press statement saying he'd sue the MPAA if anybody under 17 got to see the movie and ended up killing people; I think another lawyer should have made another statement saying that if that happened, he'd sue the first lawyer for giving everybody the idea.

One of the more interesting things about the book (which admittedly annoyed most people I know who read it) was that its narrator ultimately turned out to be fairly unreliable.  Here, we find that out late in the film, and it's at that point where we can sort of see where things are going, though there are earlier tipoffs that might be dismissed by the viewer as poor plotting.  Things like this work better in books than in movies, since in movies with unreliable narrators, things either get close to outright cheating (Fight Club), or go over the line entirely (The Usual Suspects).  American Psycho handles this fairly well; it's easy to see when something isn't quite right (an exploding police car, for example), and since the movie never leaves the head of the narrator, we only see what he sees, and the film always plays fair in that respect.

Played down from the book is its most harrowing aspect, the portrayal of towering callousness of the affluent toward the destitute.  None of the violence in the book was half as disturbing as reading about somebody spending five hundred bucks on lunch and then scarcely noticing he's stepping over a homeless man who probably just froze to death.  (there's one scene with a homeless man here, but it's used differently; I don't remember if it was taken straight from the book or not)  What's played up the most is the black humor and the sledgehammerly satirical look at male vanity.  The humor is on the mark; as for the satire, I dunno, this is ludicrously far beyond any man I know.   Sure, we all have our surrogate-dick-comparison sessions, but if this is anywhere near a perceptive look at this kind of male, I'm glad it's only a very specific kind.

Setting it in the 1980's was straight out of the book, which was published when the 90's hadn't really happened yet.  The film makes much of its 80's-ness, though it didn't really need to; the 90's turned out, ultimately, to be much more of the same, didn't they?  For that matter, even pop music, changing its tone drastically as the decade began, became in the end just as conformist and tame as that which came before.  American Psycho would not have been appreciatively different if Bateman waxed ecstatic about (oh, who are some modern-day pop-slop corporate-music whores that come to mind) Mariah Carey, The Goo Goo Dolls, and Matchbox 20; nothing else in the film nails it down in its decade.

At any rate, Ellis himself quite likes the movie, for whatever that's worth; even he admits that authors are haphazard judges of what makes a good adaptation of their work, though isn't everybody? (can you count the number of times somebody online sobs "They ruined it!" when a favorite novel is adapted for the screen?)

I never got to see this movie on its original run, everybody I know having seen it without me on its opening weekend (sonsofbitches!). So, it took me several months to see this in the dollar theaters; in terms of box-office take, it appears to have done quite well, and most reviews I've read have been very positive (though while it made its first appearance at the Sundance Film Festival, everybody said the same thing: Bale's great, the movie's mediocre).  Mind you, almost everybody I know didn't much like it.  Oh well, nuts to them, I'm recommending it.  The last movie I can remember that tackled black humor in quite this way was Very Bad Things, which was so stupid and empty that the only way I could even be offended was in the implication that it was meant as entertainment.  I'm more than happy to see that American Psycho handles itself with a lot more...well, everything good.

BACK TO MAIN PAGE BACK TO THE A's