American Psycho (2000)

American Psycho (7/10)

Some outraged self-appointed guardians of public morals have been getting their knickers in a twist about the very idea of a film being made of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, with its reputation (apparently well- deserved) for stomach-turning descriptions of violence, often against women. Now that we can see the film itself, this outcry seems rather silly, because instead of a puke-inducing gore-fest, what we get is a dark satire on the 1980s with not much on-screen violence. Thanks to the screenplay co-written by Guinevere Turner and director Mary Harron, the film is also a very funny critique of men and their vanities, while shaming them for their treatment of women as possessions. American Psycho is a slasher movie with the slashing taken out and feminist analysis put in. The audience's expectation of violence is cleverly exploited in the opening credits, and similar teasing takes place in the film's use of a clip from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Blood-and-guts fans will be very disappointed.

Christian Bale is very impressive as psycho super-yuppie Patrick Bateman - a master of the universe who has a fabulous job doing... well... very little, it seems, except arranging his social calendar. Bateman and his fellow ubermenschen are not materialists in the sense that they value possessions, but their lives revolve around appearance and one- upmanship. Bateman's narration details, with a complete lack of irony, the various body scrubs and facial creams he uses as he performs his morning grooming and workout routine. This stuff is important to him. Rather than comparing penises, these men express superiority over one another by their relative ability to book a table at this week's fashionable eatery. The best scene in the film occurs when Bateman and his friends, if friends they are, compare business cards and the bottom falls out of Bateman's world when he realises that a colleague's card is classier than his.

Bateman's scary shallowness is also demonstrated in the scenes in which he prepares to indulge in murder or joyless professional sex by giving those he is about to butcher or bed an admiring and pseudo-intellectual analysis of the music of Whitney Houston, Phil Collins or Huey Lewis and The News. It's hilarious stuff, but will audiences today get it? Tom Wolfe satirised the 80s in The Bonfire of the Vanities, but he did it before the decade was over. A typical movie-goer in his or her mid twenties would have been ten years old in the mid eighties, so might be too young to have the appropriate cultural reference points. Too young to remember the 80s. What a thought.

The film's ending leaves things confused and unresolved. I have no problem with ambiguous endings, and I do not know whether the ending is taken from the source novel, but the trick anti-resolution to this thinly-plotted movie was a big let-down. After my initial confusion at the end of the film, there is only one explanation that seems to make sense, and it's a complete cop-out.

American Psycho is a fine satire wrapped up in a mediocre thriller. And it seems to have a commercial problem: the people who would probably get most out of it are the very people who would be least likely to want to see it. The marketing boys have done nothing to address this problem and if the movie bombs, it's they who should get chopped into little pieces.

-- Gary Jones Homepage: www.bohr.demon.co.uk PGP public key available from servers (DH/DSS key ID: 0x11EAE903)