Review of American Psycho (2000) by Filmmaster — 20 Apr 2015

A New York stock broker spends his evenings killing people, or does he?

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.

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.

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.

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?

A very twisted and dark comedy. One of my personal favorites.