Halloween the Film Watchening Part 3: (#2) American Psycho
So I had never seen American Psycho until a few days ago when I noticed it was on HBO Go, and I thought that I really run out of excuses for not seeing it as this point. I've heard it described as riveting, terrifying, surreal, and one of the best performances of Christian Bale's career.
Well...in order, sort of, no, no and yes.
Look, I don't want to take anything away from this film, I can see why it gets so much love. Christian Bale is mesmerizing as Patrick Bateman; he perfectly sells the role of a bland, foppish, forgettable i-banker who is bursting from the inside with homicidal mania.
The problem is that the rest of the film doesn't seem to care. This may be the boringly shot movie about a murderous psychopath ever. It's so boringly shot that it manages to externalize Christian Bale's performance to the point where I lost track of his behavior entirely and he ceased to be a man on the edge drowning in the mundanity of his own excesses and just became a guy who laughed too much and gabbed on uncomfortably about music before somewhat inexplicably taking an axe to someone's face.
It was like someone told Bale that this was going to be Hitchcockian surrealism and then no one told anyone else involved in the film. The whole thing feels like a missed opportunity to really get inside the head of Bateman's character and expose the sheer boredom of the existence that he himself is trying to escape.
The violence is brutal, but it's not really terrifying either. Maybe it's oversaturation from this era of high-end make-up effects and CG, but there are plenty of films from before American Psych that managed to make violence actually horrific. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's almost like the violence is so matter-of-fact that it barely matters (except for the bit with the chainsaw, which actually was pretty riveting, if only for Christian Bale's expression).
As for the ending...I liked it. Mostly. But by that point, the film had tried so hard to avoid surrealist overtones, the moment of confusion basically fell flat. It felt like it hadn't earned that moment of doubt and denial, and its a shame, because the ending is the one part of the film that could have completely stood on its own if the rest of the film had been up to the tone set by Bale's performance.
Well...in order, sort of, no, no and yes.
Look, I don't want to take anything away from this film, I can see why it gets so much love. Christian Bale is mesmerizing as Patrick Bateman; he perfectly sells the role of a bland, foppish, forgettable i-banker who is bursting from the inside with homicidal mania.
The problem is that the rest of the film doesn't seem to care. This may be the boringly shot movie about a murderous psychopath ever. It's so boringly shot that it manages to externalize Christian Bale's performance to the point where I lost track of his behavior entirely and he ceased to be a man on the edge drowning in the mundanity of his own excesses and just became a guy who laughed too much and gabbed on uncomfortably about music before somewhat inexplicably taking an axe to someone's face.
It was like someone told Bale that this was going to be Hitchcockian surrealism and then no one told anyone else involved in the film. The whole thing feels like a missed opportunity to really get inside the head of Bateman's character and expose the sheer boredom of the existence that he himself is trying to escape.
The violence is brutal, but it's not really terrifying either. Maybe it's oversaturation from this era of high-end make-up effects and CG, but there are plenty of films from before American Psych that managed to make violence actually horrific. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's almost like the violence is so matter-of-fact that it barely matters (except for the bit with the chainsaw, which actually was pretty riveting, if only for Christian Bale's expression).
As for the ending...I liked it. Mostly. But by that point, the film had tried so hard to avoid surrealist overtones, the moment of confusion basically fell flat. It felt like it hadn't earned that moment of doubt and denial, and its a shame, because the ending is the one part of the film that could have completely stood on its own if the rest of the film had been up to the tone set by Bale's performance.