A Clockwork Orange of the noughties

Rating: 8/10 (31 July 2015)

It's the 80's outside, and it looks like Patrick Bateman is living a true American dream: a job of an investment banker, a pitch-perfect physical shape, a pack of high-status jock friends and a hot fiancée. But is he really? Because behind this mask of success there are real demons, skeletons in the closet and heads in the freezer.
To some adepts of Stanley Kubrick, even comparing their beloved masterpiece to anything else would be a sacrilege. But those films are indeed strangely similar. Even though the former bathes in a cosmopolitan decadence and preaches about a conflict between a citizen and a state, while the latter is more about an American mission of the world's guardian and a conflict between a person and a society. But both of these films choose a very peculiar means of delivering their messages - a sheer and unobscured violence, gore and sexual narcissism.
To be honest, A Clockwork Orange didn't work for me. Partly because it lost most of its shocking charge over the decades, and the scenes that must've been extra provocative in the 70's are now nothing too special. But it's not just that. The main character of the movie was always just a part of a bigger system, something he might have loathed but at the same time would've been helpless and even pointless without, like a fish without water. Which makes the overall drama less intense and more like a sketch from a regular "homo homini lupus est" life.
In American Psycho however, the drama resides within a single man, in his life and (or maybe it would be better to say "or") in his head. Patrick Bateman tries his hardest pretending to be a normal fish, but he's already suffocating in the poisonous pond of his life, and nothing, even the drastic measures, can help him truly embrace it and feel fulfilled.
Maybe this concept works better because, unlike a bizarre and rather dystopian world of A Clockwork Orange nobody could imagine living in, American Psycho shows us a very believable image of an American upper class citizen's life. So believable that Patrick Bateman could easily be neighbors with Bud Fox from Wall Street. Which only makes it even more shocking to see how different are the things those seemingly similar people do behind the closed doors of their vast apartments.
One could not talk about this film and not mention Christian Bale's performance. We all know him as a versatile actor capable of doing extraordinary things to make a bang out of his roles, and if you doubt that then simply look up that pic with a chart of weight changes he made himself go through in order to fit into his roles. Yet this time it's not just the weight. It's that unabated self-adoration and self-loathing. Separately those things had been done a million times, and i could probably recall Philip Seymour Hoffman being natural doing each of them for various roles, but i have yet to see a better display of a character showing them both at the same time. Still, such brilliance has its drawbacks. Because, even cast along with such heavyweights as Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon, Bale simply outshines everyone else, effectively making this film mostly a single actor's performance. What is worse though is that the rest of the cast don't even seem to care to make their presence on screen memorable or at least noticeable.
Despite being set in the time of Reagan's presidency, American Psycho is obviously a child of late 90's and early noughties. I'm trying hard to remember when the movies started showing this mental shift from glorifying success and making it an apex of human desires and dreams to despising this glorification and rejecting the vanity it brings and symbolizes. Maybe it was Fight Club that pioneered this niche, in which case its cult status gets another reason to exist. But while Fight Club uses mental illness as a main ingredient for an action thriller where the protagonist does break the system he hates so much, here in American Psycho we are ultimately left clueless whether these breakouts of insanity really took place. What if they didn't - and all this was just a sick cry for help from a soul forever trapped in the cage society put it in? Or maybe they did - and the society simply didn't care, busy with its everyday routine. Wouldn't it be even worse?