DIRECTOR
Mary Harron
SCREENWRITERS
Mary Harron
Guinevere Turner
based
on the novel by
Bret Easton Ellis
PRODUCERS
Christian Halsey Solomon
Chris Hanley
Edward R. Pressman
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Andrzej Sekula
MUSIC
John Cale
EDITOR
Andrew Marcus
CAST
Christian Bale (Patrick Bateman)
Willem Dafoe (Donald Kimball)
Jared Leto (Paul Allen)
Josh Lucas (Craig McDermott)
Samantha Mathis (Courtney Rawlinson)
Matt Ross (Luis Carruthers)
Chloe Sevigny (Jean)
Reese Witherspoon (Evelyn Williams)
Cara Seymour (Christie)
Justin Theroux (Timothy Bryce)
Guinevere Turner (Elizabeth)
MPAA rating: R or unrated
Running
time: 101m
U.S. release: April 14, 2000
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Mary
Harron movies
reviewed on this site:
- I
Shot Andy Warhol
|
American
Psycho arrives on movie
screens as a brilliant second draft -- the work of art that Bret
Easton Ellis' notorious novel should have been. Even those of
us prepared to give Ellis the benefit of the doubt were appalled
by such passages as the following (warning: do not read the next
sentence if you are easily offended):
"It was cool this morning but seems warmer after I leave
the office and I'm wearing a six-button double-breasted chalk-striped
suit by Ralph Lauren with a spread-collar pencil-striped Sea
Island cotton shirt with French cuffs, also by Polo, and I remove
the clothes, gratefully, in the air-conditioned locker room,
then slip into a pair of crow-black cotton and Lycra shorts with
a white waistband and side stripes and a cotton and Lycra tank
top, both by Wilkes, which can be folded so tightly that I can
actually carry them in my briefcase." Truly the stuff of
nightmares.
Ellis' real downfall was that he envisioned a sprawling, Dostoyevskian
architecture but lacked the skill to draft it; he is a serious
novelist but a terrible, monotonous stylist. Mary Harron, who
directed the adaptation, deftly takes over; she tidies up Ellis'
blueprint, builds the house, and makes herself right at home.
The script, which Harron cowrote with Guinevere Turner, couldn't
be more succinct -- it hums right along, from one thing to the
next. An axe murder that takes Ellis 217 dawdling pages to get
around to, for instance, appears a brisk half hour into the film.
That axe murder, along with the very few other slayings that
survived the book-film odyssey, occurs safely off-camera; Harron's
film isn't about gory special effects, but about the rage and
contempt that fuel murder (and, not coincidentally, the corporate
world). The slowly fragmenting protagonist, Patrick Bateman (Christian
Bale), may voice his desire to stab a woman to death and play
with her blood, but we don't have to look at him doing it. When
Patrick, a corporate Jekyll by day and a rabid Hyde by night,
invites a pair of prostitutes to his ritzy apartment and does
unspeakable things to them with a coathanger, the episode is
left to our busy imaginations (which conjure up greater horrors
than a film is allowed to show).
As in the book, Patrick slaughters with almost cartoonish impunity.
He never gets caught, even when he wants to get caught.
"I like to dissect girls. Did you know I'm utterly insane?"
he confides, deadpan, to an oblivious colleague. Patrick's shallow
fiancée (Reese Witherspoon), his cronies at the office,
his lovestruck secretary (Chloe Sevigny), even a detective (Willem
Dafoe) investigating the disappearance of one of Patrick's victims
-- none of them can possibly believe there's a demon in their
view. Patrick a killer? It seems ridiculous. After all, he's
no different from the other gutless wonders clogging the hallways
of Pierce & Pierce.
Christian Bale, a Welsh actor best known here for his childhood
performance in Empire of the Sun, affects a hilariously
smarmy American drawl that's part Casey Kasem, part Rod Serling.
Having the time of his life every second of the way, Bale grabs
onto this largely hollow role and pumps it with all the diabolical
charisma it can hold. Nature has also gifted Bale with an amusing
little V-shaped crease that bisects his brow whenever someone
pops Patrick's bubble of superiority. When a colleague dares
to have a more elegant business card than Patrick's, out comes
the V-crease; the axe soon follows. Harron has recast American
Psycho as a comedy about the fragility of masculinity, and
Bale cheerfully plays the sap for her.
The book was tedious and messy, fixating on the squalid details
of Patrick's slaughterhouse of an apartment; the movie is clean
and trim, getting much mileage out of the outlandish dishes served
at the finer restaurants. (The food is more disgusting than any
of the carnage we glimpse.) Harron and cinematographer Andrzej
Sekula (Pulp
Fiction) can't get enough of the stark white atmosphere
(racially as well as visually -- the only people of color here,
significantly, are either homeless or service-level employees
who quickly get dispatched, which doesn't make the movie racist
but aware of the racism of the world it depicts). The movie is
cold but not quite distanced; Harron uses the inherent, identifying
power of movies to draw us into Patrick's fevered reality. Bale's
robust performance has a lot to do with it, too -- he makes Patrick
the most likable complete bastard since Malcolm McDowell amused
himself throughout A Clockwork Orange. The comparison
to Kubrick is apt, even earned; one can picture Kubrick handling
this material with a similar elegant malevolence giving way to
unexpected flashes of compassion.
Yet even Kubrick might not have directed Ellis' story (widely
disparaged as misogynist) as a sly feminist satire. American
Psycho gains immeasurably from having been written and directed
by women. Harron and her writing partner Guinevere Turner (who
makes a brief, vivid appearance as Elizabeth, one of Patrick's
deb acquaintances who comes to an unfortunate end) don't hold
out much sympathy for airheads like Patrick's fiancée
or the drug-addled waif (Samantha Mathis) he's sleeping with
on the side. But I very much doubt a male director could have
given us a character like "Christie," a seen-it-all
prostitute played by Cara Seymour with heartbreaking resignation.
Christie knows what Patrick is, but goes home with him anyway
-- twice -- because she needs the money he's flashing in her
face. A lot of the movie is fun and games -- Patrick's hack job
on an insufferable co-worker (Jared Leto), set to the bounce
and swagger of Huey Lewis' "Hip to be Square," is first-rate
Grand Guignol slapstick -- but Cara Seymour's tired, frightened
face brings the movie abruptly into focus. She's a real person
trapped in Patrick's demented playpen, and when Patrick comes
after her with a roaring chainsaw, the movie goes over the top,
but it also becomes tragic and genuinely horrifying in a way
that goes beyond satire.
Following Ellis' ambiguous narrative, Harron steers the audience
through some eleventh-hour curves, and in one instance the ravishing
set design works against her: the sameness of the yuppie apartments
is so satirically thorough that those who haven't read the book
in a while (or at all) may be confused by a key scene involving
a borrowed apartment and a real-estate broker. Patrick may come
apart, but Harron holds things together; like Ellis, she toys
with the wishful theory that Patrick's atrocities may all be
imaginary -- the foul whimsies of a bored yuppie -- and when
Patrick's secretary discovers his notebook filled with feral
doodles of torture and murder it's almost Harron's way of sneaking
in the novel's gallery of horrors through a side door. But in
the end, as in the book, we are reminded: "This is not an
exit." Even if Patrick didn't commit all these crimes, so
what? Others have; others will. American Psycho is a hot-blooded
comedy that leaves a chill in its wake. |
