Kubrick with a vagina?

Rating: Null/10 (14 April 2000)

Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel AMERICAN PSYCHO had some of the crazy snap you read about from first-time consumers of NAKED LUNCH back in the day. Universally condemned, its anti-eighties satire was none too subtle but beautifully fashioned by Ellis: the tale of an outwardly impregnable but inwardly demented un-soul, told in the voice of an irritable, funny, quick, spoiled, slightly gay frat boy. The power of the book comes from that voice, and from Ellis' virtuoso use of form--as we imagine ourselves into Ellis' fictional space, we find ourselves trapped in an airless, characterless, mannequin-filled vacuum.
But it's funny--explosively, forbiddenly funny. That's the one element the writer-director Mary Harron gets on the nose in her adaptation, the first hour of which scores in the same way Milos Forman's MAN ON THE MOON did--by ripping off a really funny guy's best routines and just playing 'em straight out. Harron and her co-adapter Guinevere Turner find some nice opportunities to make Ellis' designer-drone prose cinematic--like wacko Patrick Bateman's choice to preface every murder he commits with a full-career review of an eighties AM-radio hack. (The exegesis on Phil Collins, followed by bloodbath, suggests the influence of the Ezekiel shtik from PULP FICTION.) And Christian Bale, an unlikely-looking Patrick Bateman, gives a daring conceptualized performance. Conceiving of Bateman as a non-self, Bale playacts goofily, as if cutting up for his fellow actors between takes. Since no one takes anything Bateman says seriously--even his confessions of gruesome crimes--Bale is free to thumb his nose and make googly eyes at everyone in the movie. He does so with an enormous charm that recalls Malcolm McDowell abjuring "the old in-out."
In the last twenty minutes, as Bateman melts down, Gets Real, and enters a hairline-fracture maze of what's-real-and-what-isn't, Harron seems to take cues from Cronenberg's distorted-self tragedies. Well, she ain't no Cronenberg--though John Cale's score seems to ape Howard Shore's music for the Canadian master, and the production design tries (and fails) to be DEAD RINGERS punctilious. The movie ends with an unsatisfying splotch. (Ellis' draft of the script ended with a musical number outside the Statue of Liberty--an equally hopeless but more game solution.) In small roles, Reese Witherspoon and Willem Dafoe are, as they say, "overcast," and Chloe Sevigny forms a small delta of sweet hurt feeling as the overlooked secretary who needs someone to tell her she's pretty. Sevigny responds to kindness like a shy cat getting a rub on the neck. Her byplay with Bale is worth diamonds.