Mesmerizing satire on the 1980s

Rating: 8/10 (8 September 2010)

American Psycho is a movie that casts the 1980s as a vacuous, amoral, materialistic, nihilistic, degrading and degraded era of American lifebut it tries not to be too judgmental about it.
Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) works at a major New York financial firm doing whatever it is well-dressed men do as such places. Bateman is utterly self-absorbed and obsessed with his appearance and is jealous of anyone more socially successful than he is. He's cheating on his fiancée and knows she's cheating on him. He hangs around with three businessman friends who only talk about getting high, getting lucky and getting into the trendiest New York hot spots. Oh, and Patrick Bateman is also an insane serial killer.
Now, given that, you might expect American Psycho to be some sort of thriller where Patrick Bateman is the villain and we watch him systematically slaughter people in ironically appropriate ways until one of his intended victims or some cop finally put an end to him. This movie, however, is about as far from that as you can get. It's not a thriller. The killings are random and without any greater significance. There is no heroic victim, and Patrick Bateman isn't really a villain.
This film is actually a social commentary, punctuated with moments of crazed violence and an ending that wants to leave you with more questions than answers. As social commentary it doesn't have a very dynamic plot and how much you enjoy it depends a great deal on whether you get the point it's trying to make and agree with it. But if you do both of those things, this is an almost hypnotically disturbing film that keeps you on edge until the very last moment.
Christian Bale does a very fine job with an unusually difficult character to play. Patrick Bateman is all surface. There's no internal life or self-awareness to him. He also happens to be very evil. But he's the main character in this story and we see and hear and experience the world mostly through his point of view. It's hard to spend that much time with that intrinsically limited a character and not get sick and tired of them. Bale manages to hold your attention and emotional involvement all the way through, and not just through his inherent charisma. He lets you feel sorry for Bateman as a man who is desperate for satisfaction in his life but cannot achieve it and doesn't even really know what it would be. Bateman has no conscience but Bale makes you feel that he as an actor might have one, giving the audience something to connect with.
The social commentary in American Psycho comes from our observing Bateman in his natural environment and noticing that the rich New York City crowd he runs with isn't that different from him. Indeed, the film forces you to wonder why they all aren't out butchering people left and right and suggests that Bateman is just more honest about what he is while the others never stop to think about it. I n a world of yuppie scum, the serial killer is the only one with any real spiritual integrity.
This is a very well directed film. Haron crafts scenes of berserk violence with an almost dreamlike serenity. She not only makes us understand the social hierarchy and status competition that these financial sharks pour into their business cards, but she also makes us see how completely arbitrary and nonsensical it is at the same time.
American Psycho does have one of those "twist" endings. You know, where the stuff you just spend and hour and 40 minutes watching turns out not to be what it appeared. But while many of those kind of endings ruin a film by making everything you see meaningless, American Psycho gets it right. Instead of just rendering everything before it invalid, this twist ending gives it all a different interpretation. What happened may not have happened but it still meant something.
American Psycho is a movie with a sedate, intellectual veneer about a world where veneer is all that really exists. It wants you to think about thatbut it's not interested in telling you what to think. It asks you to substitute your judgment into the story and make of it what you will. So, if you're interested less is something that will entertain you and more in something will make you ponder, try this film.