Barry Norman knows nothing.

Rating: 9/10 (1 November 2009)

Barry Norman once said that playing Patrick Bateman, a rich twenty-seven year old Wall Street nutjob, could very well have been 'suicide' for Christian Bale. Ha! What did he know? American Psycho is a dissection of the modern executive man syndrome, but set in the eighties with Gordan Gecko haircuts, Charlie Sheen all-night benders, sharp suits, bags of drugs and enough sexism to give Germaine Greer a stroke. It is Wall Street but without the building tension of a plot. Instead, all we are left with is a character piece that expresses itself through Bateman's narrations on how he is not really here, that he feels nothing but 'disgust' and 'greed' and how he knows not why his nightime murder sprees are becoming more violent and horrific.
Throughout this film we are, as is Bateman, clueless as to why he feels the need to slay beautiful women and fellow yuppies; why he sweats through his Valentino couture suits when a colleague produces a more tasteful business card than his own (Batemen later butchers the said colleague with an axe to the face); and why he feels the need to put a nail gun to the head of his unsuspecting secretary whilst having a quiet drink at his quite expensive apartment. As it progresses we get the sense that this film is not going to peak in a 'Seven' type ending, but that instead it is a wandering exploration of how enough money leads to illusions of grandeur and the belief that you can do just about anything you want; that it is a conceptual piece and the nada-plot and subsequent uber-violence are products of that concept. We are left with an idea and the realisation that Bateman probably isn't there at all, that he is just one of a million like him that can't see past the end of their thousand dollar Mont Blanc fountain pen and ten grand oyster movement Rolex submariner.
This film launched Bale's career in a way that many other films could not. It was daring, controversial and ultimately a gamble. It's a shame that other actors do not take this kind of risk... and that Bale went on to make Terminator Salvation. That's another review though. Still, if Barry Norman thought that this film could have gone one way or the other: how did it go the one way? Well, aside from the stuff already mentioned, the film is a broad mixture of amazing set pieces, costumes that make tailors salivate and very black humour. Bateman ends up with an almost catch phrase line 'I've got to return some videotapes' which he repeats several times in the film instead of, say, strangling his homosexual colleague in the toilets of an expensive boys' club, or as a parting line in a brutal public break up with his fiancé.
The thing that struck me about this film is that despite the story's focus on violence toward women, it was in fact directed by a woman, Mary Harron. Perhaps this is where the film works. If it had been directed by a man the focus may have been solely anti-woman, rather than the humour, the style of the time and the concept of this finished product.