American Psycho (2000)

 American Psycho        ***

Rated on a 4-star scale Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre) Released in the UK by Entertainment Distribution on April 21, 2000; certificate 18; 101 minutes; countries of origin Canada/USA; aspect ratio 2.35:1

Directed by Mary Harron; produced by Chris Hanley, Edward R. Pressman, Christian Halsley Solomon. Written by Mary Harron, Guinevere Turner; based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Photographed by Andrjez Sekula; edited by Andrew Marcus.

CAST.....
Christian Bale..... Patrick Bateman
Willem Dafoe..... Donald Kimball
Jared Leto..... Paul Allen
Reese Witherspoon..... Evelyn Williams
Samantha Mathis..... Courtney Rawlinson
Chloe Sevigny..... Jean
Justin Theroux..... Timothy Price
Matt Ross..... Luis Carruthers

Patrick Bateman is someone Tom Wolfe might have come up with if he had written his books on acid. He's an arrogant suit from Wall Street obsessed with physical fitness, facial care products, designer clothing and expensive restaurants. And scoring cocaine. And misogyny. Oh, and he likes to mutilate people, and play around with their guts, too.

The character is the creation of Bret Easton Ellis, whose 1991 novel "American Psycho" was set amid the Manhattan yuppie scene of the late 1980s. The book was twisted, but it needed to be, because it had extreme things to say. Ellis saw the widespread obsessive egoism and greed of the Me Decade as dangerously sick, and his vision of its potential to produce vicious murderers makes a fair amount of sense. After all, any idiotic businessmen who made enough bucks could follow their every impulse and shit on whomever they wanted to, and their attitude was championed as fashionable.

Now "American Psycho" is a film directed by Mary Harron, with Christian Bale in the lead role. As in the source material, Bateman divides his time between working out, making lunch appointments, sitting around in his office and butchering fellow New Yorkers. Onscreen we see him stabbing a homeless man and a female acquaintance, decapitating a hooker with a chainsaw, blowing up a crowd of cops, chopping up one of his colleagues with an axe and telling us about numerous other crimes. Even when a private detective (Willem Dafoe) starts investigating the disappearances, though, Bateman never comes close to being caught. Why would anyone suspect a 'normal', standard, efficient young capitalist earner of criminal activity?

The killings in the story hammer home in a jarring manner the message of how inhuman Bateman and his ilk are; although his chums don't kill people or know that he's doing so, they do share his level of detachment from decent values. Most of the film illustrates this through black humour. In one scene, for example, a group of men use their business cards for a vanity contest, comparing them like cowboys showing off the sizes of their guns.

The problem with the comedy in the film is that Harron doesn't trust the material to be intrinsically funny, and has her actors deliver lines in broad, goofy tones, making clear they're in on the joke. That doesn't prevent us from laughing, but it does affect the satirical power of many moments -- we giggle mainly because the characters are talking in a preposterous manner, rather than because they're saying preposterous things.

Since almost every scene is performed in this silly way, the film is nowhere near as intense as the novel. If we laugh at the characters' paper-thin morals, that's the extent of our reaction; Harron doesn't let us give them enough thought to also be appalled by them. You could take the murders out of her "American Psycho" and it would be the same movie -- its purpose is to merely point at the vacant pomposity of the male yuppie, and ridicule it.

Still, on that level the movie works well. Although it is a missed opportunity (Ellis's angry expression of the madness of the situation was more affecting), it is at least an entertaining deflation of white-collar stuffed shirts, and those guys can be the most despicable of people. I see them all the time in bars and restaurants, thinking their suits make them mature, arrogantly raising their voices, telling stupid childish jokes to each other, rambling in stockbroker jargon that they think impresses onlookers. And now, whenever that happens, I can smile to myself that someone else in the vicinity will have probably seen this movie, and will be laughing inside at what morons it shows them to be.

COPYRIGHT(c) 2000 Ian Waldron-Mantgani Please visit, and encourage others to visit, the UK Critic's website, which is located at http://members.aol.com/ukcritic