The movie American Psycho may be the best possible film version of the scandalous Bret Easton Ellis novel of the same name.
After Ellis wrote it, his novel inspired a game of hot potato among publishers because of its explicit, first-person descriptions of torture-murders by narrator Patrick Bateman, a soulless Wall Street yuppie equally addicted to blood and designer labels. When it was finally published in 1991, it was greeted with protest rallies.
It was indeed very strong stuff. Between Bateman's mind-numbing ruminations on the musical merits of Huey Lewis & The News and the art of getting reservations at exclusive restaurants, there are repellent scenes of murder by power drill and nailgun. The material naturally led to criticism that the book was as monstrously misogynist as its killer. It didn't help that a copy of the novel was found on the bedside table of real-life killer Paul Bernardo, who presumably missed its satiric content.
Nevertheless, director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol) and her screenwriter Guinevere Turner (Go Fish) evidently saw the material differently. They saw the slick, empty, designer label-loving Bateman as the ultimate exponent of '80s materialism and greed. So they torqued up the satire, toned down the violence, and rendered the material just ambiguous enough to be tolerable. Funny, even.
Bateman (Christian Bale) is presented as a cipher, a maniac mannequin who can be driven to the most fearsome rage when a colleague presents a business card more impressive than his. He maintains a "mask of sanity" in his daily dealings with his fellow yuppies, all Wall Street "masters of the universe." He good-naturedly chastises a friend for an anti-Semitic remark. He professes a concern for social justice.
But it's a facade as thin as his herb-mint facial masque. In fact, Bateman takes the master of the universe thing a little too literally. After a bad day, he may unwind by knifing a vagrant in a back alley.
His madness escalates. Motivated by jealousy and ego, he lures a coworker to his apartment to kill him with a shiny new axe after lulling him with a hilarious monologue about the brilliance of Huey Lewis. He hires a pair of prostitutes to realize a porn fantasy, and pays extra to hurt them.
And then he gets really nuts.
Where the book was punctuated with scenes depicting the murders of women, Harron wisely chooses not to go there for much of the film. Quite right, too -- a faithful adaptation of the book would have been unwatchable.
Harron employs a more elegant sensibility and chooses to lift from the book's salient satiric content. She emphasizes the "American" in American Psycho by portraying Bateman's empty materialism and the void of his personal culture: a blend of Top 40 pap, pornography and horror movies.
Bale, an actor who is male-model-handsome enough to epitomize Bateman's cold surface glamour, is also smart enough to understand that the character he's playing is a not just monster, but a loser.
It doesn't detract from the film's potency that Bateman's crimes may ultimately be a product of his fevered imagination since, in his case, the thought is as terrifying as the deed.
Unfortunately, the film's satire, at its most politically explicit in a final scene featuring a televised address by then-president Ronald Reagan, is stale-dated. It's 2000 after all, and the '80s were ... so 10 years ago.
Harron may argue that the film is as relevant as ever in this affluent new decade. But the '80s trappings serve to make the film feel safe. And, love it or hate it, "safe" is one word you could never use to describe the book.
(This film is rated R)
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