American Psycho

Directed by Mary Harron

Viewed on Amazon Prime

 

Summary: A narcissistic corporate exec indulges his increasingly deranged appetite for sex and violence. This movie is also a wonderful satire of corporate culture.

 

I’ll be honest and upfront with you all before we get too deep into American Psycho, I have seen this movie before. Usually I only review movies if I see them for the first time but I’m making an exception here because the last time I saw this movie was almost a decade ago and I figured that was enough time apart to come back with renewed interest. Also I really like American Psycho and I just wanted to talk about it.  I hope you can forgive me for this transgression, because the rest of the reviews this week will be for new movies.

I already blew my cover and revealed that I enjoyed American Psycho but let’s take a step back and go over the plot briefly before I really get into my feelings for the movie as a whole. Our film focuses on Patrick Bateman, played excellently by Christian Bale, a young corporate executive at his father’s firm. Bateman seems to have everything going for him, but his life is slightly complicated by his love of, and compulsion to, murder. We follow Bateman as he attempts to fulfill his heightening perversions, both of the sexual and murderous varieties, while evading a private detective, played by Willem Dafoe, who is quickly suspicious of Bateman’s role in these matters. I am avoiding spoilers for now but there will be a section at the end of the review where I get into spoilers, because this movie is a wild wild ride.

 

The acting here is just immense. I’ve always liked Christian Bale’s performances but here he just gives 110% to making Patrick Bateman the platonic ideal of the narcissistic self involved Wall Street jackass. And to match that we have a hugely talented cast with Jared Leto, Willem Dafoe, Reese Witherspoon and Chloe Sevigny and they are all just perfect here. Sure, no one can quite match the intensity that Bale brings to the table but everyone has more than enough subtlety to play off of Bale in an interesting way. I would have liked to have seen more of the supporting cast but because the main plot is mostly a character study of Patrick Bateman the other cast members are there to show how they relate to him, not how they exist on their own. It makes sense in context though because Bateman is a massive narcissist, to the point where during sex scenes he is clearly shown to be admiring himself in the mirror rather than the other participants, and it seems sensible to frame the movie this way, almost illustrating how he sees the world, where nothing and nobody matters if it doesn’t involve him in some way.

 

What really shines throughout the movie is it’s incredible sense of humor, which focuses on satirizing 80s corporate culture. There are just so many brilliant moments that display the true absurdities of that lifestyle, and one scene in particular sticks in my mind, the scene in which a group of executives are comparing their new business cards. What is particularly good about this scene, other than the writing and acting, is the masterful editing that frames this excessively mundane exchange as a titanic power struggle, complete with the cards themselves having the blade unsheathing sound effect when they are removed from their holder. It is ludicrous and matched only by Bateman’s breathless narration as he sits in reverent awe, floored by how his business card has been clearly bested. The best part though is how these people comparing cards aren’t business competitors, they are all coworkers competing to see who has the best business card amongst company vice presidents! I don’t want to give all the amusing moments away but there are so many more than that and they give American Psycho a really unique tone to it, very similar to the tone in, strangely enough, Robocop, with both having a grim comedic take on 80s corporate culture.

 

Just because it strays into the darkly comic fairly frequently doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deliver disturbing content, which American Psycho has in droves. There is plenty of good old fashioned violence to be disturbed by, but where American Psycho really comes into its own is through its depiction of Bateman’s growing psychosis. Bateman starts out as a self obsessed narcissist but quickly grows into something much more dangerous, and its that shift, which we see from very close up, that sets up all the horrors that we see him commit. Seeing Bateman’s shift in personality, and with it his growing callousness towards everyone else, is so shocking because it seems like this was always there and just waiting for a moment to come out

 

Darkly comedic with a violent backbone, American Psycho is even better than I remember it. Christian Bale’s performance alone is worth watching for, and the smartly written satire is a big plus, taking what could have been a dull serial killer film and turning it on its head. I highly recommend this movie to anyone who likes their horror with a dash of dark comedy.

 

Spoilers:

 

Okay so, in order to fully discuss this movie we do have to get into a bit of spoilers, as the film progresses we begin seeing things more and more out of line with reality, Bateman committing more illogical crimes and somehow not being caught, and in the ultimate scene Bateman confesses his crimes, only for the recipient to deny that these crimes ever took place. It is a bit ambiguous as to what this means but I always took it as Bateman being an unreliable narrator of his own life, and the movie was just his fantasies and desires, rather than being literal truth. If that is true then large portions of the movie drastically change in meaning, going from the film being about a murderous corporate executive to a corporate executive who is losing his mind, one who creates elaborate violent fantasies as a way to feel some sort of control over his life and in that is the real tragedy.

 

Patrick Bateman cannot escape his feelings of powerlessness, and by trying to fight them has created a world where he is the best at everything and holds all the power in all his relationships. Occasional glimpses of Bateman’s real life shine through, like when a woman makes fun of him for enjoying Whitney Houston or him rationalizing why coworker’s confuse him with someone else at the firm. He would rather think that it’s because this person was on drugs or because he has the same job as the other person so naturally people would get confused, and not because he has an odd fixation with pop music and is otherwise unmemorable to his coworkers.