American Psycho (2000) Review
8/10
Patrick Bateman works at a Wall Street firm where nobody knows what anybody does, eats at restaurants chosen by reservation difficulty, and describes his skincare routine in voiceover with the seriousness of a man defusing a bomb. He also kills people, possibly.
The 8 is for an adaptation that solved a problem two other filmmakers walked away from. Bret Easton Ellis published the novel in 1991 to a reception close to hysteria. It was called unfilmable for a decade. Harron and Guinevere Turner filmed it by deciding it was a comedy about status and shooting it that way.
The point I hold back is for the last twenty minutes, where the film has to negotiate the novel’s ambiguity and does so slightly too neatly. What comes before is close to perfect.
It Is a Comedy and Always Was
The business card scene is the thesis. Four men in a boardroom compare their business cards. The cards are near identical. The music swells. Bateman sweats through what the film treats as a genuine crisis, and the joke is that it is one.
Everything violent in the film sits inside that register. Bateman murders a colleague to a lecture on Huey Lewis and the News. He explains Whitney Houston’s discography to two women he has hired. The horror is real and the framing is deadpan, and the deadpan is what makes the horror legible.
Harron has said she found the novel funny where most readers found it appalling, and that reading is the whole adaptation. Played straight, this material is unwatchable and stupid. Played as satire of a specific year on a specific street, it is precise.
That is why the film has outlived the controversy around the book. The novel was received as an argument about violence. The film is an argument about status, and status is a subject that keeps.
Tone is a decision made before the first line, and it decides what the audience is allowed to feel about everything that follows. The same events, shot straight, become a different film with a different argument.
When adapting material that resists you, look for the register the source was written in before you look for the scenes to keep. Harron kept almost every incident and changed the pitch, and that was the adaptation.
The rule holds for original work. If your violence is not landing, the problem is usually that the surrounding scenes have not told the reader how to hold it. Establish the register early and in something small, like four men and a business card.
Bale Built the Performance From a Talk Show
Christian Bale was not the studio’s choice. Lionsgate acquired distribution and pushed for bigger names, and Bale spent a long stretch attached to a film that kept trying to replace him. He waited it out and Harron held the line.
His way into the character came from watching Tom Cruise on a talk show. What he took from it was a quality of intense friendliness with nothing operating behind the eyes. He built Bateman on that and it is exactly right: a man performing warmth as a technical exercise.
The performance works because Bale plays Bateman as pathetic before he plays him as frightening. The character wants a table at Dorsia. He wants his card to be the best card. He is a man whose interior life is a subscription to other people’s opinions, and the murders are what happens when that fails to satisfy.
Watch his face while he talks. The eyes are doing continuous arithmetic on whether the performance is working. It is a comic performance delivered at horror-film intensity, and almost nobody else was doing that in 2000.
Toronto Playing Manhattan
The film cost seven million dollars. Principal photography ran seven weeks from February 1999, and the majority of it happened in downtown Toronto, with the Toronto-Dominion complex standing in for Bateman’s office. Some exteriors were shot in New York, where the story is set.
That constraint improved the film. Bateman’s Manhattan is not a real city. It is a sequence of interchangeable surfaces, restaurants that look like other restaurants, apartments that look like magazine spreads, offices with no visible work in them. A city built from doubles is the correct city for a film about men who cannot tell each other apart.
Andrzej Sekula shot it in cold navy and bone white, everything hard-edged and reflective. The camera moves smoothly and observes without sympathy. Nothing in the frame is warm, including the people.
The budget also forced restraint on the violence. Most of it happens at the edge of frame or after a cut, and the film is more disturbing for it. What you assemble yourself is worse than what you are shown.
There is one more benefit to shooting a New York story somewhere else. The film never gets distracted by the city. No skyline establishes anything, no location does any lifting on its own account, and Bateman moves through a set of rooms that could be anywhere expensive. The geography is as interchangeable as the men.
A limited budget forces selection, and selection is most of style. The version of this film with forty million dollars would have shown more and meant less.
Interchangeability is hard to write and easy to shoot. On the page you need the characters to keep misidentifying each other, and the mistakes have to carry no consequence, because consequence would imply somebody was paying attention.
When violence has to happen off screen for practical reasons, put the camera on a face instead. The audience will build something worse than your budget could have bought, and they will believe it because they made it.
The Ambiguity Is the Point and the Problem
Late in the film Bateman confesses at length to his lawyer, who laughs and tells him he had dinner with the man Bateman claims to have killed. The apartment full of bodies is empty and freshly painted, with a realtor showing it.
The novel leaves this unresolved on purpose. Either Bateman killed those people and a world this inattentive failed to notice, or he did not and his interior life has finally detached from any anchor. Both readings indict the same thing.
The film reaches for the same ambiguity and lands slightly heavier on the second reading. The lawyer scene plays as a reveal, and reveals resolve. Harron has said she was unhappy that audiences took it as a definitive answer about a fantasy, because that reading lets the world off.
It still works. But it works a fraction less than the novel does, and that fraction is the point I am withholding. The strongest version of this ending leaves the audience unable to choose.
The scene that does survive intact is the phone message. Bateman confesses everything to an answering machine, in detail, at length, and the confession changes nothing at all. Nobody calls back. Nobody investigates. A man screams the truth into a machine and the world continues exactly as before, which is the film’s real ending regardless of how you read the lawyer.
Why It Reads Differently Now
In 2000 the film was received as a provocation and a stunt. The book’s notoriety came with it, protesters petitioned Toronto over the shoot, and a good deal of the coverage never got past the subject matter.
What happened since is that the satire became legible. The specific texture Harron nailed, men competing over objects that are identical, a workplace where nobody produces anything, a personality assembled entirely from consumer preferences, describes more of the present than it did of 1987.
The film has also been absorbed by an audience that reads Bateman as aspirational, which is its own commentary and one Harron did not intend. That misreading is not a flaw in the film. It is a demonstration that the film was about something real.
Twenty-five years on it plays as a period piece about a period that never ended, which is the most durable thing satire can become.
Satire dates when it attacks a trend and survives when it attacks a mechanism. Shoulder pads date. Status competition among people with no way to distinguish themselves does not.
The test while drafting: could this target exist in another decade wearing different clothes? If yes, you are writing about a mechanism. If no, you are writing a time capsule, which is a legitimate thing to write but has a shelf life.
Expect to be misread. Any satire built on a seductive surface will attract people who want the surface. That is a cost of the technique, not evidence that it failed.
Should you watch American Psycho?
Yes, and go in expecting a comedy. The reputation attached to this film is about the novel and about the murders, and neither is what you sit down to watch. What you get is a precise, cold, extremely funny film about a man who cannot bear that his business card is the same as everybody else’s.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 4 of my film lists