American Psycho
USA/Canada 2000
Reviewed by Tony Rayns
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Manhattan, 1987. Patrick Bateman, a 27-year-old Wall Street broker, spends most of his time and substantial income on clothes, dining and clubbing. Notionally engaged to Evelyn Williams, he is having an affair with Courtney Rawlinson, the fiancée of his colleague Luis Carruthers. An avid consumer of drugs, pornography and prostitutes, Bateman fantasises murdering friends, rivals and strangers.
Upstaged at a board-room meeting by his colleague Paul Allen, Bateman works off his frustration by knifing a street-sleeper and later contrives to murder Allen with an axe. He lets himself into Allen's apartment and re-records the answering-machine message to say that Allen has gone to London. But when private investigator Donald Kimball begins enquiring into Allen's disappearance, Bateman grows nervous.
Events spiral out of control, at least in his mind. An attempt on the life of Carruthers (who is gay) is misinterpreted as an expression of closeted affection. He is deflected from murdering his secretary Jean when Evelyn calls at the crucial moment. A threesome in Allen's apartment with his friend Elizabeth and prostitute Christie turns into a chaotic bloodbath in which both women die. The shooting of an interfering old woman leads to a police chase through the night streets; Bateman kills a cop and at least two others before hiding in his office and calling his lawyer to confess everything. But when he next visits Allen's apartment he finds it being redecorated and up for sale. In Bateman's absence, Jean checks his private diary and finds doodled evidence of his psychosis. Bateman runs into his lawyer (who takes him for someone else) and learns that Paul Allen is indeed in London.
Review
Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est? The widely shared intuition that lousy books make good movies and vice versa finds a partial corroboration in Mary Harron's long-coming adaptation of American Psycho. Bret Easton Ellis' stream-of-unconsciousness novel maps its narrator's befuddled stasis in a miasma of designer labels, hard-to-get bookings in fashionable restaurants and psychotic fantasies. Resting on the thin conceit that an 80s Manhattan consumerist lifestyle would be the perfect cover for random serial killing and on a series of overplayed gags (identikit personalities lead to recurrent cases of mistaken identity, intense emotional crises are triggered only by fears of losing status in the food chain), the book runs out of shtick around the halfway mark but dances on the spot for another 200 pages. As a satire of a social phenomenon, it's no more cutting than the caricature of a braying, depraved yuppie in Naked.
Against the odds, Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner have succeeded in extracting a viable narrative screenplay from this plotless blank. Almost everything in their film comes from the book, but they have sensibly junked a huge amount: the recitations of designer brands, the taunting of beggars with banknotes, the obsession with a morning television talkshow, the 'ironic' ubiquity of Les Misérables in the background, the starved rat and most of the sex, violence and sadism. What's left is a brittle and stylised satire of Me-generation values rather conventionally structured as an escalation into madness.
The opening scenes sketch the norms and parameters of Bateman's life: platinum AmEx cards, the workless office, the Robert Longo painting, exfoliating skin creams, that kind of thing. Unsubtle pointers to his psychosis are dropped in sparingly at first but gradually allowed to take over the film until they climax in the night-time shoot-out with the cops on Wall Street, complete with exploding cars and circling helicopters like something out of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. The film presents its psychotic episodes as fantasies from the get-go (Bateman leaves trails of blood on his sheets, his walls and across the lobby of his W. 81st Street building without arousing suspicions), which turns Willem Dafoe's scenes as an investigating gumshoe into dramatisations of Bateman's paranoia and makes the closing scenes - in which Bateman is forced to confront the unreality of his dreams - more interesting than they otherwise would have been.
Thanks to excellent art direction and a set of self-effacing performances from those playing the yuppies, Harron captures late-80s vacuity better than she captured late-60s vacuity in I Shot Andy Warhol. She flatters the book by playing up its humour: the decision to turn into dialogue three of the book's interpolated critiques of MOR rock-pop stars (on Phil Collins, Huey Lewis and Whitney Houston, all spoken while preparing people for the slaughter) was sort-of inspired, and the sex scene in which Bateman never stops admiring his own prowess in a mirror is genuinely funny. Christian Bale makes a fine co-conspirator in all this, presenting Bateman as a man on the cusp between braggadocio and a barely suppressed awareness of his own insignificance.
And yet the film doesn't work. Late in the game Harron brings in Ronald Reagan (seen defending the Iran-Contra scandal) to provide an objective correlative for the gap between surface and substance as found in the yuppie milieu generally and in Bateman in particular. But Bateman has insisted from the moment he started intoning voiceovers that he exists only as a cipher ("I simply am not there"), and so it's hardly a knockout conceptual punch to close the film with a threatening close-up of his eyes and a threatening assertion on the soundtrack that he has gained no insight into himself or catharsis from his experiences. The problem, again, is the book, an insurmountable obstacle. If Harron and Turner had set out to make a real movie on these themes, they would never have started from a script like this. As it is, they've come up with an ingenious adaptation, minimising the book's shortcomings and maximising its intermittent panache. But they remain prisoners of the smug and self-satisfied Bret Easton Ellis.
Credits
- Director
- Mary Harron
- Producers
- Edward R. Pressman
- Chris Hanley
- Christian Halsey Solomon
- Screenplay
- Mary Harron
- Guinevere Turner
- Based on the novel by
- Bret Easton Ellis
- Director of Photography
- Andrzej Sekula
- Editor
- Andrew Marcus
- Production Designer
- Gideon Ponte
- Music
- John Cale
- ©Am Psycho Productions, Inc.
- Production Companies
- Lions Gate Films presents an Edward R. Pressman production in association with MUSE Productions and Christian Halsey Solomon
- Executive Producers
- Michael Paseornek
- Jeff Sackman
- Joseph Drake
- Co-producers
- Ernie Barbarash
- Clifford Streit
- Rob Weiss
- Alessandro Camon
- Line Producers
- Victoria Hirst
- Title Sequence Shoot:
- Gretchen McGowan
- Executive in Charge of Production
- Lauren McLaughlin
- Production Executives
- New York:
- David Daniels
- Pressman:
- Gregory Woertz
- MUSE:
- Jordan Gertner
- Timothy Wayne Peternel
- Creative Executives
- Lions Gate:
- Carrie Walkup
- Pressman:
- Zach Schiff-Abrams
- Erin O'Rourke
- Production Co-ordinators
- Nancy Jackson
- New York Unit:
- Shell Hecht
- Lions Gate Films Co-ordinator
- New York Unit:
- Katherine Rosin
- Production Manager
- New York Unit:
- Peter Pastorelli
- Location Managers
- Michael Blecher
- New York Unit:
- Andrew Saxe
- Post-production
- Supervisor:
- Philip Stilman
- Co-ordinator:
- Deanna Strong
- 2nd Unit Director
- Andrew Marcus
- Assistant Directors
- Andrew Shea
- Jennifer Deathe
- Cassandra Cronenberg
- New York Unit:
- Peter Pastorelli
- Charles Zalben
- Michael Pitt
- Title Sequence Shoot:
- Steve Apicella
- Script Supervisors
- Dawn Sorokolit
- New York Unit:
- Mary Kelly
- Title Sequence Shoot:
- Catherine Gore
- Casting
- Billy Hopkins
- Suzanne Smith
- Kerry Barden
- Canada:
- Clare Walker
- US, Associates:
- Jennifer McNamara
- Mark Bennett
- ADR Voice:
- Sondra James
- Camera Operators
- Paul Boucher
- New York Unit:
- Tom Houghton
- Title Sequence Shoot:
- Vince Vennitti
- Don Cornett
- Special Effects
- Kavanagh Special Effects
- New York Unit:
- Conrad V. Brink Jr
- Key Effects
- John MacGillivray
- New York Associate Editor
- Philip Harrison
- Art Director
- Andrew Stearn
- Set Decorator
- Jeanne Develle
- Costume Designer
- Isis Mussenden
- Wardrobe Supervisors
- On-set:
- Patrick Antosh
- New York Unit:
- Michael Adkins
- Hartsell Taylor
- Key Make-up
- Artist:
- Sandra Wheatle
- New York Unit:
- Margot Boccia
- Key Hair
- Stylist:
- Lucy Orton
- New York Unit:
- John D. Quaglia
- Title Design
- Bureau.com
- Opticals
- Toronto:
- Film Opticals of Canada
- New York
- The Effects House
- Video Inserts
- Roger Wong
- Solo Piano
- Eve Egoyan
- Orchestra Conductor
- Martin Goldray
- Orchestrations
- Randall Woolf
- Music Supervisors
- Barry Cole
- Christopher Covert
- Music Editor
- Jeff Wolpert
- Additional Music Editing
- James Flatto
- Mishann Lau
- Music Engineer
- David Voigt
- Mixer
- William Garrett
- Music Consultant
- Jeff Wolpert
- Technical Music Consultant
- M.J. Mynarski
- Soundtrack
- "True Faith" by Peter Hook, Stephen Hague, Gillian Gilbert, Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, performed by New Order; "Walking on Sunshine" by Kimberley Rew, performed by Katrina and the Waves; "Simply Irresistible" by/performed by Robert Allen Palmer; "Paid in Full (Coldcut remix)" by Eric Barrier, William Griffin, Benny Nagari, performed by Eric B. & Rakim; "Music for 18 Synths" by/performed by Sheldon Steiger; "Secreil nicht" by Mediaeval Baebes; "I Touch Roses" by Theodore Ottaviano, performed by Book of Love; "Everlasting Love" by Crispin Merrell; "Ya llegaron a la luna" by Santiago Jiménez, performed by Santiago Jiménez Jr; "Cuatro milpas" (trad), arranged by Francisco Gonzalez; "Hip to Be Square" by Huey Lewis, Bill Gibson, Sean Hopper, performed by Huey Lewis & The News; "Suicide" by/performed by John Cale; "Lady in Red" by Christopher John Davison, performed by Chris De Burgh; "If You Don't Know Me by Now" by Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff, performed by Simply Red; "In Too Deep" by Phil Collins, Tony Banks, Michael Rutherford, performed by Genesis; "Sussudio" by/performed by Phil Collins; "Pump up the Volume" by Martyn Young, performed by M/A/R/R/S; "What's on Your Mind (Pure Energy)" by Paul Jason Robb, Kurt H. Larson, performed by Information Society; "Red Lights" by Toby Anderson, Julian Godfrey Brookhouse, Martin Bene Drummond, Ben Volpelière-Pierrot, performed by Curiosity Killed the Cat; "The Greatest Love of All" by Linda Creed, Michael Masser, performed by The London Philharmonic Orchestra; "Try to Dismember" by/performed by M.J. Mynarski; "Something in the Air (American Psycho remix)" by David Bowie, Reeves Gabrels, performed by David Bowie, additional production/remix: Mark Plati; "Who Feelin' It (Philip's Psycho mix)" by Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, performed by Tom Tom Club; "Watching Me Fall (Underdog remix)" by Robert Smith, Simon Gallup, Perry Bamonte, Jason Cooper, Roger O'Donnell, performed by The Cure; "Trouble" by/performed by Daniel Ash; "Deck the Halls", "Joy to the World"
- Sound Designers
- Ben Cheah
- Paul Urmson
- Sound Mixers
- Henry Embry
- New York Unit:
- Bernie Zuch
- Supervising Re-recording Engineer
- Daniel Pellerin
- Re-recording Engineers
- Peter Kelly
- Keith Elliott
- Operator
- Mark Zsifkovits
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Jane Tattersall
- Supervising Dialogue Editor
- Fred Brennan
- Dialogue Editor
- Garrett Kerr
- Sound Effects Editor
- David McCallum
- Foley
- Artists:
- Andy Malcolm
- Goro Koyama
- New York, Additional:
- Marko Costanzo
- New York, Engineer:
- George A. Lara
- Mixers:
- Ron Mellegers
- Andrew Tay
- Pro-Tools Operators:
- Rebecca Wright
- Anna Malkin
- Food Co-ordinator
- Johanna Weinstein
- Food Stylists
- Peter Blakeman
- Ron Donne
- Title Sequence Shoot:
- Rick Ellis
- Stunt Co-ordinators
- Matt Birman
- New York Unit:
- Frank Ferrara
- Gun Handler
- Frenchie Berger
- Pig Wrangler
- Jane Conway
- Cast
- Christian Bale
- Patrick Bateman
- Willem Dafoe
- Donald Kimball
- Jared Leto
- Paul Allen
- Josh Lucas
- Craig McDermott
- Samantha Mathis
- Courtney Rawlinson
- Matt Ross
- Luis Carruthers
- Bill Sage
- David Van Patten
- Chloë Sevigny
- Jean
- Cara Seymour
- Christie
- Justin Theroux
- Timothy Bryce
- Guinevere Turner
- Elizabeth
- Reese Witherspoon
- Evelyn Williams
- Stephen Bogaert
- Harold Carnes
- Monika Meier
- Daisy
- Reg E. Cathey
- homeless man
- Blair Williams
- waiter 1
- Marie Dame
- Victoria
- Kelley Harron
- bargirl
- Patricia Gage
- Mrs Wolfe
- Krista Sutton
- Sabrina
- Landy Cannon
- man at Pierce & Pierce
- Park Bench
- Stash
- Catherine Black
- Vanden
- Margaret Ma
- dry cleaner woman
- Tufford Kennedy
- Hamilton
- Mark Pawson
- Humphrey Rhineback
- Jessica Lau
- facialist
- Lilette Wiens
- maître d'
- Glen Marc Silot
- waiter
- Charlotte Hunter
- Libby
- Kiki Buttingnol
- Caron
- Joyce Korbin
- woman at ATM
- Rueben Thompson
- waiter 2
- Bryan Renfro
- night watchman
- Ross Gibby
- man outside store
- Christina McKay
- young woman
- Allan McCullough
- man in stall
- Anthony Lemke
- Marcus Halberstram
- Connie Chen
- Gwendolyn Ichiban
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Entertainment Film Distributors Ltd
- 9,129 feet
- 101 minutes 26 seconds
- Dolby digital
- Colour by
- DeLuxe
- Anamorphic [Panavision]