'American Psycho': Murderer! Fiend! Cad! (But Well-Dressed)
Watching "American Psycho" is like witnessing a bravura sleight-of-hand feat. In adapting Bret Easton Ellis's turgid, gory 1991 novel to the screen, the director Mary Harron has boiled a bloated stew of brand names and butchery into a lean and mean horror comedy classic. The transformation is so surprising that when the movie's over, it feels as if you've just seen a magician pull a dancing rabbit out of a top hat.
Four years ago Ms. Harron's film "I Shot Andy Warhol" performed similar magic by creating credible facsimiles of Warhol and his motley entourage. "American Psycho," a more ambitious, far more confident film, salvages a novel widely loathed for its putative misogyny and gruesome torture scenes by removing its excess fat in a kind of cinematic liposuction. Except for a few wittily chosen lists, the book's numbing catalog of high-end consumer items has been drastically edited. Its murder rate has also plunged. The trimming demonstrates once again that less is often more. What remains of the story is a sleek, satirical, yuppie-era "Jekyll and Hyde" that blithely tap dances along the fault lines separating movie genres.
At the heart of the film is a star-making performance by the handsome Welsh actor Christian Bale (adopting an impeccably snooty pseudo-preppie American accent) that softens the novel's portrait of a serial-killing Wall Street hotshot just enough to force us to identify with this ultimate narcissist. Mr. Bale's portrayal of 27-year-old Patrick Bateman, a budding master of the universe by day (he works in mergers and acquisitions, which he facetiously refers to as "murders and executions") and homicidal maniac by night, is alternately funny, blood-curdling and pathetic.
As this character metamorphoses from preening, wolfish yuppie to chain-saw wielding maniac to whimpering crybaby, Mr. Bale makes us feel the underlying connections between these multiple personalities. One minute Mr. Bale's Patrick is a cowering corporate geek and self-described empty shell, the next an arrogant, name-dropping smoothie, the next a hysterical wimp unable to distinguish reality from fantasy.
He's also a serial killer, or at least he is in his imagination. The movie plays adroitly with the notion that his violent spasms are merely the revenge fantasies of a repressed corporate toady. The fluidity with which Mr. Bale moves from one state of mind to the other makes for the kind of tour-de-force performance you'd expect from Sean Penn, another master of throwing tear-stained tantrums.
From the opening credits, in which drops of blood are confused with red berry sauce drizzled on an exquisitely arranged plate of nouvelle cuisine, the movie establishes its insidious balance of humor and aestheticized gore. That sly confusion between the beautiful and the gruesome extends to the language of the screenplay by Ms. Harron and Guinevere Turner.
Dinner specials are described by waiters in the tones of unctuous coroners announcing the results of autopsies.
Some of the funniest speeches are Patrick's pompous lectures -- each a prelude to homicide -- on the 80's pop stalwarts Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News.
While the movie's interiors conform to late-80's styles of design and architecture, they, too, are eerily exaggerated. The severe black-and-white minimalism of Patrick's gadget-filled apartment has the feel of a high-rise morgue.
The movie's sexual ethos is a bifurcated world of male monsters and their often shallow but still recognizably human girlfriends. Patrick and his Wall Street cronies are interchangeable reptilian pod people, soulless under their designer-label shells and supercilious smirks. (One running joke finds Patrick being continually confused with others, despite his wealth, status and miraculous instant entree to New York's priciest restaurants.)
In one hilarious early scene, he and his colleagues compare their business cards (the texture of the paper and the quality of embossing) in a competitive game of show and tell that has a murderous undertone. Those colleagues, wittily embodied by Jared Leto, Justin Theroux, Matt Ross and Bill Sage, are the ne plus ultra in cocky, carnivorous sang-froid.
Compared with these robotic cobras, the women are almost poignantly human. Reese Witherspoon, as Patrick's petulant fiancée, plays another of her perfectly measured sweet-and-sour ingénues. Samantha Mathis is almost as impressive as Courtney, Patrick's depressed, drug-addled girl on the side. Chloë Sevigny brings a fragile, touching dignity to the role of Patrick's discreetly smitten secretary, Jean. As Christie, a streetwalker Patrick brings back to his apartment for videotaped sexual threesomes that may or may not turn into blood baths, Cara Seymour projects a wary, glowering intensity.
In draining off the novel's fat, Ms. Harron has strengthened and clarified Mr. Ellis's angry satire of the greed-is-good decade and the confusion between surface and substance in so much of American life. As Patrick embarks on his series of grisly murders, each of which only whets his appetite for further carnage, the movie portrays his acts of violence as increasingly frustrated attempts to be noticed.
But either Patrick's armor of designer labels and hard-bodied readiness is impenetrable or else no one wants to look below his surface to the murderous inner child. Ultimately, his escalating blood lust gives new meaning to the term "narcissistic rage."
As Patrick's rampage gathers force, the movie's air of unreality sharpens, and his crimes are committed in surreally empty spaces. No matter how ghoulish his behavior, the movie lends it a ghastly high-gloss chic. During one murder, Patrick wields the most gleaming designer ax you've ever seen. Instead of showing that ax splitting human flesh, the movie shows only the victim's blood spraying the murderer in a voluptuous crimson whoosh. For a split second, Patrick suggests a psychopathic yuppie Jackson Pollock wearing a werewolf grimace as he stands triumphantly over a freshly splattered canvas.
As brilliantly as the movie's visual style evokes a world spat out by a Vanity Fair art director, "American Psycho" remains a one-joke satire of materialism and soullessness. It's a joke we would like to think we've got. Having arrived safely in the year 2000, it would be easy to shrug off "American Psycho" as the last cinematic word on an embarrassingly gluttonous cultural moment that has gone the way of Patrick's favorite murderous background anthem, "Hip to Be Square." But has it?
With stock prices gyrating in the ozone and dot-com paper billionaires being freshly minted every month, our culture is at least as money-mad as it was back then. We're told that consumption isn't as conspicuous today as it used to be. Well, maybe it's no longer cool to do cocaine in public. But as more and more of us "improve" ourselves through pharmaceuticals and plastic surgery, our consumption is just as conspicuous in a deeper way. Instead of buying perfect surfaces, we're tinkering with surfaces below the surface. But it's still about show.
At the very least, "American Psycho" is a dazzling period satire. It's still too early to know what, if anything, it might foretell.
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