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Film by Jaime Frederick American Psycho starring Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe and Chloe Sevigny directed by Mary Harron now playing check listings I’ve always thought that I could find something I liked in almost any movie, no matter how bad, but I’ve begun to believe that less and less lately. It is beyond my comprehension that Mary Harron, who directed I Shot Andy Warhol, could make such an innocuous movie from a novel so nauseating, precisely rendered and controversial as Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. It’s hard to say which is more repulsive, though: Ellis’s book or Harron’s trivialization of it in her latest film. Now, it’s hardly fair to hold any movie entirely in thrall to its literary source. As with any cinematic adaptation, the deviations from the original text are sometimes the product of inspiration and genius (taking the relation of Apocalypse Now to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as an obvious example). This is not the case with American Psycho. If, as Cynthia Amsden claimed in her article on Harron in last week’s Fast Forward, this movie attempts to distill "the satire out of the story," then the film is an unmitigated failure, even on its own terms. First, Harron has clearly mistaken farce for satire, and, in collusion with Christian Bale, who plays the titular psycho Patrick Bateman, has rendered this shallow, sadistic killer as a mere caricature. Bale plays Bateman’s cold amorality by shooting lots of arch looks at the camera, and the ceaseless one-note mincing bleeds the film of any effect it might have had. Harron’s directorial decision to play this material for "black comedy," as the film has also been labeled, is her second mistake. The novel is unbearably funny in places, in a sick kind of way, but I kept wishing the more accomplished Whit Stillman, director of Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, had been hired for this project despite the fact that Ellis’s book is much darker than anything Stillman seems capable of writing. It’s just that Stillman’s world is that of yuppies and Wall Street high finance in the era of Reaganomics and Donald Trump’s New York. As a true satirist, Stillman could have captured the nuances Harron misses in Bateman’s character that make him the monster he is – the greed, superficiality and misogyny, and his focus on image, wealth and power. The point of Ellis’s disturbing, emetic book is that the world of investment banking embraces the values embodied by this psychopath so fully that, on the surface at least, he is virtually indistinguishable from any other character. Mary Harron doesn’t even try to capture this element of the novel. It seems lost on her completely, and she should be vilified for that oversight more than anything else. As far as the way the film’s violence is portrayed, Harron was almost on to something. It would be really interesting had she deviated even further from the text in this respect, and made an adaptation of American Psycho without any on-screen violence at all. It would be difficult, yes, but not impossible, and a filmmaker who could rise to that challenge would create a much more compelling film than what Harron has given us. This may seem a ludicrous suggestion to anyone who’s read the book, but it’s no more ludicrous than the cartoon on display here, every character lampooning something darker, more sinister, that should be, but isn’t, lurking beneath the surface.

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