American Psycho
Directed by Mary Harron.
There was no way Brett Easton Ellis’ brilliant novel could have been transferred properly to the screen. It was too sterile and repetitive, let alone violent and gruesome, to have had more than a quarter of its bulk filmed. But these elements were done in a very literary way, and made a thorough and ultimately terrifying point about human nature, greed and so forth. Mary Harron’s screen adaptation has, for my money, lost almost all of the novel’s impact, trading it in for a smugness and reassurance that eventually becomes annoying in a way the book never did.
It was a similar experience to Dune: brilliant but huge book gets eviscerated for the big screen leaving only a few verbatim conversations, an altered ending (which is slowly infuriating me in this case too) and none of the intriguing ideas that made the book so much more than just a collection of words.
The film has a few things in its favour, mainly the adequately flat set design and the clothing, such an important part of Patrick Bateman’s life. But that’s really about it. A few allusions to masks and identity in the opening reel, and some hints about the unreality of his world are dropped fairly soon, and another major subplot doesn’t even make a cameo. At least we get the three famous monologues about pop music.
Like many others, I had a really specific idea of how this film should look, and this wasn’t it, so of course I’m going to be let down. Nowhere do we plumb the depths of Bateman’s life, neither the extremes of sterility or violence are given much screen time so it is not like we can be shocked into examining the culture he represents. Ellis blasted our psyches with a vision of an impersonal hell which became uncomfortably familiar to us all. Harron delivers a smug little comedy of mannerisms that left me unsatisfied and unhappy. Perhaps one day a more interesting film version of American Psycho will be made, but until then this is all we’ve got, and it’s just not enough. Admittedly it could have been worse, but it could just as easily have been so much better.
Craig
