American Psycho (2000)

AMERICAN PSYCHO **1/2 (out of four)
-a review by Bill Chambers (bill@filmfreakcentral.net)

starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Reese Witherspoon, Jared Leto screenplay by Guinevere Turner, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis directed by Mary Harron

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It is the late 1980s, and creature-of-habit Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale, in a perversely mesmerizing performance), a Master of the Universe, has it all. He works at the prestigious Manhattan firm of Pierce and Pierce, smokes expensive cigars, and inhabits a bleach-white apartment, which used to signify wealth. What's a man who has everything to do?

Murder, he wrote. Of course we knew that Bret Easton Ellis' sanguinary satire American Psycho, a novel I devoured many years ago, would be toned down in its translation to the silver screen. Unfortunately, director Mary Harron and screenwriter Guinevere Turner have also de-fanged the non-violent remainder of Ellis' free-floating narrative and given it a Hollywood horseshit ending.

Such neutering was partially uncontrollable: on the page, first person descriptions of title character Patrick Bateman's obsessively regimented life read like a series of product placements, and everything down to shampoo became a status symbol; Harron could not obtain permission to mention various brands, and thus Patrick's materialism is no longer so relentless.

But other changes are less reasonable, such as the by now prerequisite twist ending, which castrates the film by reducing the Ted Bundy-ish Bateman to a live-action Milton, the subservient office drone who would wait until a co-worker was just out of earshot before making ridiculous threats on his life in a series of Mike Judge cartoons.

The script's new, Fight Club-esque climactic scenario is an empty gesture of atonement--Harron and Turner have glibly apologized for the concept itself, literalising a snippet of Patrick's voice-over: "There is no real me." They've also homogenized Wall Street; while the film nicely plays up the interchangeable identities of its power-brokers (they're distinguishable only by their business cards), it doesn't emphasize their rock star existence. (I recall only one instance of heavy drug use among the inner circle, whereas Ellis has Patrick pill-popping every third line to tune his behaviour like a radio.)

I normally don't harp on the differences between a book and its cinematic adaptation, but we're not dealing with a mass-market bestseller here. The only reason to shoot American Psycho is to say you did, not to start a franchise or mount a star vehicle. Harron's American Psycho is more interested in toying with our desire to see it (witness the clichéd opening sequence in which we are misled to believe that raspberry sauce is actually dripping blood) than shedding some light on the era of conspicuous consumption. (Or, at least, Ellis' take on it.)

The one great, arguably feminist aspect that Harron and Turner have brought to the project is a sense of paranoid fantasy: the movie occasionally steps outside of Patrick's P.O.V., which Ellis never did, to illuminate the fear of his victims. ___ BY THE WAY... Because I live in Ontario, Canada, I viewed the uncut version of American Psycho. Harron was forced to trim about one minute of rather tame kink from a three-way sex scene in order to avoid the stigmatic NC-17 rating, just another demonstration of the Motion Picture Association of America's bass ackwards agenda: Patrick butchering a homeless man and chasing a woman with chainsaw were deemed fit for mass consumption without any alterations.

-April, 2000