American Psycho has one trick

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This article was published 01/11/2001 (8918 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For the Free Press

This film version of American Psycho takes a lousy novel and turns it into an initially intriguing but ultimately minor movie. Bret Easton Ellis, who penned the controversial 1991 book, isn’t so much a writer as someone who can type, but Canadian-born director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol) has a prickly intelligence and a cool eye, and she transforms what is potentially slasher trash into stylized social satire.

Brit actor Christian Bale (Velvet Goldmine) brings icy precision to his role as Patrick Bateman, deliberately “normal” investment banker by day, increasingly frenzied serial killer by night. Lacking any recognizable human centre, Patrick is obsessed with the appearance of things, and American Psycho is full of comic, flat-voiced inventories of the designer products and high-concept foods that crowd the moral wasteland of ’80s America — Valentino suits and Cerruti ties, squid ravioli in a menograss broth with goat cheese profiteroles, high-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets “that you can only find in Santa Fe.”

Dwelling on high-end brand names is shallow, of course, but Patrick’s nocturnal search for something underneath these smooth antiseptic surfaces is much, much worse — bloody and horrible, done with knives and drills, razors and chainsaws.

Patrick attacks the homeless. He rages against workplace competitors, fretting murderously over men who have better business cards, get better tables at more exclusive restaurants, own apartments with better views of the park. But his most destructive anger and disgust is directed against women.

Thankfully, Harron and her screenwriter collaborator Guinivere Turner exercise exquisite control over the violence. They keep actual on-screen bloodshed to a minimum (there is less gore here than in many mainstream Hollywood action pics), but the implications of the scenes are truly terrifying.

It can be argued that American Psycho isn’t really about a serial killer anyway — the portrait is in fact practically and psychologically improbable and becomes even more darkly bizarre as the film goes on — that Patrick is essentially a metaphor for the yuppie objectification of the world. Thus the casual misogyny of Patrick’s interchangeable friends, their “killer” business instincts and their contempt for the poor differ from Patrick’s annihilating fury only in degree.

Harron and Turner take this point as far as it can go, which really isn’t that far. Finally this is a one-trick film that ends up being stretched into dull irrelevance. There is nothing in American Psycho that couldn’t be accomplished in one of those three-minute Kids In The Hall sketches about the taxi-hailing, corporate clones. I can just see Dave Foley with a blood-stained axe.