Nine years after the publication of Bret Easton Ellis' banned book comes this blackly comic wry satire featuring one of the best performances by one of film's finest actors.
Christian Bale stars as Patrick Bateman, an investment banker at the firm of Pierce and Pierce. Just as Bateman's name suggests Norman Bates from Psycho, so too does the name of the firm broadly hint at the investment banker's homicidal interests.
What makes American Psycho (2000) a masterpiece is tying together rapacious hollow greed, white male privilege, empty consumerism, and wounded narcissism with mental imbalance and murder. That, plus a razor-sharp dead-on performance by Bale.
However, the ending falls apart like over-boiled chicken. Falls apart so bad, it's enough to drive a person crazy.
The story wouldn't have any of the impact if Bateman was a plumber. But this is a movie with something to say. Which also seems to be pretty much why the book got banned.
So many great images, so many great moments. Bale captures Bateman's lifeless eyes just right. Everything he does is selfish, everything he says, artificial. He has no tastes of his own, but rather only rattles off critiques from other sources used like weapons against people in lieu of conversation.
He's not really human, he's not really there, and he's not really different from any of the others.
When the story starts (set in 1987), we have no way of knowing whether Bateman has killed anyone yet. We see him kill a transient here, a prostitute there. He tells us in Voice Over all about the designer toiletries he uses and various lotions he applies to keep his skin soft.
Then we see another guy at the firm who has the same haircut as Bateman, and wears the same style suit and eyeglasses, but whose business card is just a little bit better than Bateman's.
Big mistake for that guy.
And ultimately a big mistake for the filmmaker. Writer-director Mary Harron in an interview with Charlie Rose admitted she made a mistake with the film's ending by creating too much ambiguity. This ambiguity is the film's fatal flaw. The viewer is left wondering if Bateman ever even killed anyone. Was it all merely his violent imagination or delusions?
Well, no. And that's where Harron regrets the ambiguity. Patrick Bateman definitely does commit the murders. (Except maybe for a few, not to quibble.) Yet the film makes a better double-feature with Wall Street or The Wolf of Wall Street than Psycho. This is because, even though Bateman quotes serial killer Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for Robert Bloch's novel later to become the Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece, that fact is in service of the larger issues concerning who and what gets called success.
Also starring Josh Lucas as one of Bateman's silky Pierce and Pierce frenemies, Jared Leto as the guy whose business card is better than Bateman's, Reese Witherspoon as Bateman's clueless fiancée, and Willem Dafoe as the friendly neighborhood detective who would like to ask Mr. Bateman a few questions.
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