Stalking contradiction.

Rating: Null/10 (15 April 2000)

It must be said: If I hadn't read Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho -- memorized it, in fact -- I don't think I would have had the slightest idea what was supposed to be happening in the movie. A movie needs plot; this has none. A movie needs momentum; you could rearrange the scenes from the first half of American Psycho in any order and no one would notice. The ideas are confused, the structure is nonexistent, the dialogue is virtually inaudible under the INXS din, and Christian Bale has chosen an odd, odd time to reveal to the world that he is actually JIM CARREY, or at least an inbred cousin of his ( by the end Bale's impersonation of Carrey had become so distracting that I was basically sweating and gibbering along with the Bateman character. )
So why did I like it so much? Because I HAVE read the book, and the movie is a far more ruthless vivisection of Ellis than it is of the soulless, Reaganite, greed-driven 80's and all those boring received ideas that have been shoved down our throats by the media in the defanging process that the movie essentially represents. Represents, I say, because when all the smoke has cleared ( what smoke? what am I talking about? ) the movie will probably be seen as the ideal complement to the book -- the two reflect on each other like brutally shattered mirrors.
Basic summary: The book is a comedy classic, with reams and reams of hilariously insipid yuppie repartee, but it was never as disturbing as the people who never bothered to read it thought. The movie is disturbing. In the book, when Patrick Bateman lures a prostitute back to his apartment for a second time after mutilating her in some undescribed way, it's just a joke, a variation on a theme. But in the movie, the woman playing the prostitute has such a sad, symbolic, almost saintly face, that her death scene -- which is like one of the more unsubtle episodes of Itchy & Scratchy, by the way -- had even the people in the audience who were previously content to treat the whole thing as a joke actually GASPING. It made me realize how really powerful and uncomfortable the book could have been if it dropped its protective mask of irony for a page or two.
On the other hand, director Mary Harron sometimes plays it safe, content to deliver up little sushi slices of American Psycho's Greatest Hits -- the business card contretemps, the Huey Lewis exegesis, even a sign on a door that says "This is not an exit." In moments like these the movie is Classics Illustrated, a reductio ad absurdum, the final proof that American Psycho has been chewed up by mama bird and made nice and mushy for baby bird's consumption. It's too bad, because Harron has a very real gift for offbeat direction -- when she's on she's downright KUBRICKIAN, and from me this is the highest compliment imaginable.