Bale's Patrick Bateman: A villain for our time

Rating: Null/10 (22 April 2000)

I assume I'm not original in this (but I comment on Shakespeare, so I couldn't be too hung up on originality)--but I'd like to nominate Christian Bale, in his American Psycho incarnation for Iago for the first great early 21st-century production of William Shakespeare's OTHELLO. Bale's Patrick Bateman's got the youth--Iago is 28--he's got the looks (with some adjustments), and, most important, he's got the attitude.
OK, you gotta punch him around a bit, cut his hair, and have him lose about 8 years of schooling, but he looks about 28 and obviously can do just about any English-language accent you ask him to. (Our American Psycho is played by a Brit.)	And he can do a villain for our time. The Beatles are dated, I think, and it's no longer Oswald from KING LEAR and "I Am the Walrus" for Our Devil. It's Patrick Bateman, at least as Bale plays him: very darkly comically, the psycho-pathology behind and underlying the US of A during the triumphal decades of American capital.	A Bale/Bateman Iago might work to destroy those around him not so much because they reveal the ugliness of his life but because they _are_ in ways he just is not.