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Dogged by criticism during its Toronto shoot, Mary Harron's film re-invents and invigorates Bret Easton Ellis' smarmy novel, transforming it into dark cinematic art for sophisticated adults (no kids should see this film!).
Harron, the Toronto-born, New York-based director who gave us the unique I Shot Andy Warhol four years ago, slides most of the novel's graphic violence off-screen.
Working with actress-writer Guinevere Turner's screenplay, she cuts to the quick of the matter: Turning sensationalism into a satire about obsessive materialism, narcissistic male ego and the abuse of power. The extreme elements of the story are insight, not titillation. The movie is a feminist tract, not a misogynist's wet dream.
As a result, American Psycho turns into a vicious yet giddy deconstruction of a modern American male, circa 1987. A very sick modern male. The protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is a Manhattan yuppie who transmutes into a serial killer when he comes under pressure and becomes seriously unhinged.
The man treats his body as a temple to be worshipped, even by himself. He cherishes fine clothes, food, wine, music choices and even business cards. They are not just status symbols but fetishes conferring a kind of mystical power.
Bateman (played fearlessly, brilliantly and with stunning precision by a super-buff Christian Bale) is also our narrator. A very unreliable one. So don't believe everything you hear or even see. American Psycho works on a surreal level.
At the same time, everyone but Bale plays their roles as absolute straight arrows. Willem Dafoe is a private investigator. Jared Leto is a slick young businessman who is Bateman's mirror image and his first target for violence. Reese Witherspoon is Bateman's ditzy fiancee. Chloe Sevigny (fresh from her Oscar-nominated performance in Boys Don't Cry) is his vulnerable-woman-as-victim secretary.
The killing of Leto's character -- a kind of suicide for Bateman because the two rivals are so much alike -- is the most hysterically funny killing imaginable, all done to Huey Lewis & The News' Hip To Be Square. Lewis may have pulled his song off the official soundtrack CD, but it remains in the movie and is absolutely essential to understanding how nuts Bateman is becoming as he sees his illusions of power shattered.
The film is relentless. So much so that it actually veers off track for a few seconds in its final climax, a mindless killing spree that sets up the movie's most dynamic plot twist.
Meanwhile, the fuss about the three-way sex scene between Bateman and two prostitutes is just that: A little fuss. The scene was slightly trimmed for American audiences and remains intact in Canada. It actually is sexually tame -- if psychologically deranged -- and did not need to be censored.
There is nothing tame, however, about the movie's satirical point-of-view. See it, if you dare.
(This film is rated R)