# American Psycho (2000)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

AMERICAN PSYCHO (Lions Gate) Starring: Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Chloe Sevigny, Reese Witherspoon, Jared Leto. Screenplay: Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Producers: Edward R. Pressman, Chris Hanley and Christian Halsey Solomon. Director: Mary Harron. MPAA Rating: R (violence, sexual situations, nudity, profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 97 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

I've never read the Bret Easton Ellis novel on which AMERICAN PSYCHO is based, so I don't know whether its reputation as literary garbage is warranted. Word on the street has it that Ellis' notion of satire generally involved shopping lists of designer brand names, ad infinitum, ad nauseam; the word further informed that his descriptions of destroying a human body left little to the imagination. That could easily make for a very tedious, dehumanizing read, so I can understand why potential viewers might be skeptical about a film version of this much-reviled book. After all, what could possibly be entertaining about watching a sociopath spend an hour and a half obsessing over colognes and suits between capital crimes?

Maybe Ellis didn't "get it" when it came to offering an icy-cold attack on the go-go ethos. Mary Harron, however, does. Harron's telling of the tale mixes 1980s nostalgia with pitch-black humor, anchored by Christian Bale's riveting performance. Bale stars as Patrick Bateman, a New York mergers and acquisitions vice-president who lives for all the best things in life: reservations at the finest restaurants, a taxing physical regimen, clothing by only the most deified designers. He also finds himself unable to control his impulse to murder on a regular basis, whether the victim may be a homeless man, a prostitute or an envied co-worker. When Det. Donald Kimball (Willem Dafoe) begins poking around, Patrick begins to fear that he could be caught. Then again, he could have a greater fearthat he _won't_ be caught.

The heartless, soulless heart and soul of AMERICAN PSYCHO is Bale's brilliant performance as Bateman. The role was once said to be Leonardo DiCaprio's for the taking, but he opted instead for THE BEACH. Bad for Leo; good for us. Bale plays Bateman with an exaggeration that's sure to be misconstrued as hamming it up. Bateman isn't just play-acting at belonging in the professional social circle in which he runs (his nepotistically-influenced job seems to consist mostly of reading pornography, watching "Jeopardy" and doing crossword puzzles); he's play-acting at being a human being. Bale's work is also brutally funny, most notably in scenes where he engages in rambling deconstructions of some of the decade's most banal music (Huey Lewis' "Hip to Be Square;" Genesis' "In Too Deep"). If this performance doesn't prove to be one of the year's best, we're in for a very good year indeed.

There is, of course, also the matter of the much-talked-about sex and violence, which cost the version screened at the Sundance Film Festival a few seconds of excised gyrating. Naturally the content will make AMERICAN PSYCHO a film for very specific tastes, but viewers should be clear that this isn't primarily a thriller we're talking about. Yes, there are suspense elements, and there are a few grisly deaths (most taking place out of the frame), and there are some moments of moderately explicit naughtiness. All of those elements should also be viewed in context. How anyone could view Bateman's narcissistic orgy as pornographic (or even eroitic) is beyond me; how the film could be perceived as a commercial for unbridled appetites and surrender to the id is baffling.

There's no point pretending AMERICAN PSYCHO has anything radically new, profound or insightful to say about its era. Satirical critiques of yuppie materialism have already become somewhat trite a decade later, and it's clear from minute one that the film is about turning the figurative ability to get away with murder into the literal equivalent. That doesn't make many of AMERICAN PSYCHO's finer moments any less effective, from the shallow one-liners ("I'm not really hungry, but I want to have a reservation somewhere") to the hysterical scene in which characters define their pecking order by the quality of their business cards. The third act does begin to drag, and the hallucinatory closing scenes are bound to leave some viewers scratching their heads. But AMERICAN PSYCHO gets creepier, funnier and more insinuating the longer I think about it. Source material be damned: Even if Ellis' AMERICAN PSYCHO is junk, it provided the framework for something savagely entertaining.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 psychos, cooler:  8.

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