American Psycho [reviewed by Lackey]

102 min. (uncut version), 2000
Directed by Mary Harron
My rating:
IMDB • Netflix

Could this be what the 1980s were really like?

* * *

American Psycho tells the story of Patrick Bateman. By day, Patrick is an affluent yuppie with a job he hates (mergers and acquisitions executive with a prestigious Wall Street firm), a fiancée he can barely tolerate, and all the modern conveniences money can buy. By night, he denies himself no opportunity to indulge his darkest urges: murder, sexual perversion, you name it. Either way, he’s barely human, capable of the worst atrocity you can imagine. But eventually his carefully constructed persona begins to crack under the weight of his crimes…

Okay, so we all remember the ’80s, don’t we? It was all Madonna and MTV, Bill Cosby and Michael J. Fox, Steven Spielberg and John Hughes, Louis Vitton, big hair and Spandex. A cultural golden age when money practically grew on trees…yeah, right. The decade definitely had its dark side, and while Bret Easton Ellis probably didn’t intend to expose the rot at the core of the era’s heart in his notorious 1991 novel (he apparently intended it as a more personal affair), director Mary Harron (who also cowrote the screenplay with Guinevere Turner…interesting that it took two women to bring the novel, which was widely derided as “misogynist” at the time, to the screen) gets a lot of mileage by cutting the source material’s psychological nihilism with biting commentary not just on the decade itself, but on the nostalgia for it, which in 2000 was just starting to pervade the culture.

The end result is probably the best balance of humor and bleakness I’ve ever seen. There are some undeniably funny bits: Bateman performs a moonwalk while preparing to butcher a colleague; Bateman interrupts a soliloquy on the pleasures of Phil Collins to deliver instructions to the other two members of his threesome (“Get on your knees so Sabrina can see your asshole,” he says after declaring “In Too Deep” one of the most positive and uplifting songs he’s ever heard); Bateman and his peers compare business cards. Yet the comic façade covers a bitter and breaking heart as the characters–not just Bateman–struggle with issues of identity. Who are we, and how well do we really know each other? Underlining these themes are several cases of mistaken identity–nobody ever seems quite sure who anybody else is. The film’s treatment of this alienation is actually scarier than any of the violence the film portrays (although I have to admit, I wish they’d included the scene with the rat because I’m a sick bastard).

The one problem with the script is that it often feels less like a cohesive story and more like a simple series of events, but Harron consistently distracts from the narrative flaws by keeping the plot points flowing and always providing interesting compositions (a scene in which Bateman prepares to kill his secretary with a nail gun deserves particular praise). She’s aided by one of the most perfect casts ever assembled. Patrick Bateman is simply the role that Christian Bale, not particularly well-known in 2000, was born to play. It’s definitely an over-the-top performance, but there’s a lot of nuance and pathos to it.

He’s backed up by an ensemble that isn’t exactly made up of the leading actors of the generation (Reese Witherspoon as Bateman’s fiancée, and Samantha Mathis as the woman he’s cheating on his fiancée with; Chloë Sevigny as his secretary; Jared Leto, Justin Theroux and Josh Lucas as his colleagues/rivals), but who nonetheless turn in solid and credible performances. The one disappointment here is the character of Donald Kimball, a police detective assigned to investigate the disappearance of one of Bateman’s victims. I would have liked to have seen the character used a bit more, since he’s the one instance of normality in the film’s larger-than-life world, and the great Willem Dafoe plays the character brilliantly.

That being said, most of my criticisms of American Psycho are little more than quibbles. Hannon’s got a lot of pins to juggle, and she keeps them all in the air beautifully. It may not be an (in Bateman’s words) undisputed masterpiece, but it’s a masterpiece nonetheless.

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