I first saw American Psycho in a multiplex in, of all places, Plymouth. I was looking forward to a cool, brilliant, classy, savage satire on yuppiedom, but I think most of the rest of the audience were hoping for a slasher movie. The action was punctuated with cries of "Kill 'er!" and "Stab the slag!" Ah, Navy towns.
Oliver Stone nearly directed this movie, and we should be glad he didn't, when you consider what a daft mess he made of Quentin Tarantino's unpretentiously nasty original script for Natural Born Killers. He also wanted to cast Leonard DiCaprio, who at the time was one of the biggest stars in the world. How fashions change, eh? Fortunately, it reverted to Mary Harron (who'd proved herself on I Shot Andy Warhol) and she got to have her first choice in the lead, Christian Bale. Bale's performance is one of the most rip-roaring in Nineties cinema; he's like the concentrated essence of yuppie, sun-dried (or is it freeze-dried?) yuppie. That he had to remake his body and create the accent from the ground up suits the character perfectly. Patrick Bateman is, as he says himself, all mask – there is nobody there. The smirking, male-model relish with which Bale delivers lines like "The Mud Soup with Charcoal Arugula is outrageous!" is a sight to behold. It's surely intentional that he and his pals (chiefly Josh Lucas and Justin Theroux, respectively excellent in Wonderland and Mulholland Dr.) look like nothing so much as a bunch of guys in a Hugo Boss ad, as they sit around and make offensive remarks about women and Jews. ("Hey," says Patrick with sweet reasonableness, "cool it with the anti-Semitic remarks, okay?")
The screenwriters, Harron herself and Guinevere Turner (who, weirdly, had previously co-written and starred in the sweet lesbian love story Go Fish), manage to drag the satirical essence of Ellis' novel onto the screen. It's a book like "Naked Lunch", in that nobody would let you film it exactly the way it's written. Probably only women could be so funny about how insane men can get. The actual butchery is more hinted at than shown; Bateman meets a model in a club, the next day he's twirling a lock of her hair in his fist, and that evening we notice in passing that her severed head is in his freezer. There's the notorious moment with the twirling chainsaw, and there's the hilarious and appalling Huey Lewis/axe attack moment, but there's not much else to make you lose your dinner. My only regret is that the final shot, with the "This Is Not An Exit" sign discreetly placed behind Bale's head, is all but lost on the small screen.
It can also be argued that Bateman's crackup, when he hysterically confesses all his killings over the phone to his lawyer, somewhat draws the teeth of the rest of the movie, in that nobody appears to notice what he's done. The viewer is all but forced to the conclusion that it was all in his head. Bale is brilliant in the scene, even strangely touching, but as a piece of writing (and a moment of utter faithfulness to the book) you can't help wondering whether these people want to make some good satire or just…yawn…play around with, like, textuality. Still, it's one of the best movies about the 80s, and knocks something like "Wall Street" out of the water. What are Harron and Turner and Bale doing now? Anyone know?
