Sneaks up on you, and WHAM!

Rating: Null/10 (14 April 2000)

Walking home after seeing Mary Harron's "American Psycho", I began to piece the film together in my head, and when all the little moments, the satirical digs, the violent set pieces were seen as a whole, I was struck by what Harron had presented to me. She and her co-writer, Guinevere Turner (adapting a much-maligned Brett Easton Ellis novel which I admittedly have not read), have given us a cold, dark satirical look into the blackness that resides within the postmodern image culture, and the first really memorable film of the twenty-first century.
Patrick Bateman, our title character, is a real nowhere man. A hotshot New York financial broker, Patrick is deep into the '80s world of drugs, flash, and meaningless consumption. It has rendered him a hollow soul, a blank like the white-toothed haircuts who surround him at his board table. The problem is, unlike everyone around him, he knows what a charade, what a puppet he and his whole world are, and it's driving him mad. He can't control the rage that his pointless life brings bubbling to the surface, and it lashes out in fits of brutal, slashing violence (in the film's most memorable scene of violence, a co-worker gets an ax to the face for committing the unforgivable sin of having a business card more tasteful than Patrick's). He slips further and further into horribleness, and all the while, he is concealed by his facade of smooth-money good looks and power. Finally, he totally loses his grip on reality, but when he tries to give himself over to condemnation, no one will believe it. After all, his clothes are so fine, his apartment so extravagant, his business card so crisp and just-so...
Harron's direction unflinchingly captures the almost silly decadence of this big-cash world, where young businessmen are interchangeable and their jobs are nondescript. She and Turner handle the film's violent sequences skillfully, making them genuinely jarring without allowing them to overwhelm the film's satirical points. Indeed, this is one of the few recent black comedies that really works, delivering laughs and shivers in about equal measure. Much of this is owing to some splendid work by Christian Bale in the lead. At first, I found Bale's put-on masculine vocal tone and smarmy smile too forced and slick, but as the film went on, I realized that they are a shield for a fevered mind, a shield that is becoming increasingly strained as events (and bodies) pile up. It's bravura acting, and amazingly, Bale almost makes us feel for Patrick as he realizes, in absolute horror, that he has indeed gotten away with murder.
Technically, the film is sharply handled, with special kudos going to Gideon Ponte's chillingly sterile art direction and to a finely chosen selection of ultra-bland '80s tunes (I'll never be able to listen to Phil Collins' "Sussudio" with a straight face again).
Patrick Bateman is able to hide his crimes behind perfect hair, perfect clothes, a perfect lifestyle. And he's constantly being mistaken for other people. What could they be hiding behind their facades? What can people get away with if able to conceal anything behind the right image? In a culture like ours, where the image is becoming more and more powerful as a tool of judgment, the message of "American Psycho" is one that can't be wiped away with laughter or wiped out with violence. Like Patrick in the film's final shot, we just have to look it in the eyes and learn whatever we can.