American Psycho

2/10

USA 2000, dir. Mary Harron, stars Christian Bale, Chloe Sevigny

American Psycho is a colossal disappointment. Not merely a wasted opportunity, it's a travesty of a fine novel and, in terms of the gap between expectation and delivery, probably one of the worst films of the year.

The problem is simple - Mary Harron is a clueless director. The one person you come out of American Psycho with increased respect for is Lili Taylor, who isn't in it. She was the star of Harron's best known film, I Shot Andy Warhol, and American Psycho reveals such a basic lack of talent on the part of the director that it's a miracle Warhol was watchable at all. Taylor's incendiary performance was, I now realise, so dominant it outweighed any shortcomings on the other side of the camera.

American Psycho, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis's 1990 satire, is set among the ultra-rich of 80s-boom Manhattan. All of the main characters are very well off, live in luxurious apartments, eat in fantastic restaurants, dress to kill. In the film, however, you'd be forgiven for thinking these people were bank clerks from Iowa. Everything looks cheap, all the rooms are too small, too badly furnished, the restaurants are grim pokey holes, offices are boxy cubicles. If ever a subject matter required a seductive, impressive visual sheen, it's this one, but the budget clearly wasn't there. God knows where it was filmed, but it looks about as much like New York as Kubrick's sets for Eyes Wide Shut - several scenes are set high up in tower blocks at night, and the lights of the cars in the streets far below are static, patently a cardboard backdrop.

A charitable view would be that Harron is emphasising the unreality of these surroundings for a reason, that this is her way of satirically undercutting a decadent, corrupt world of surfaces and hypocrisy. But this can hardly excuse her hamfisted use of music, or the film's directionless uncertainty of tone, or the grinding visual dullness of what's up there on the screen, or her erratic direction of her actors. The Psycho of the title is Patrick Bateman, Wall Street yuppie by day, murderous cannibal by night, and he dominates both book and film. Although Christian Bale's face is too weird for Bateman, he's physically spot on otherwise and the British actor's American accent is flawless. But his performance veers all over the place, oscillating between exuberant camp - he does a dainty dance just before one of the first murders - robotic chill and nervy jitters. Even so, at least Bale has something to work with - Reese Witherspoon, one of Hollywood's finest young actresses, is scandalously underused in the role of Bateman's fiancée, and Chloe Sevigny, as Bateman's secretary, seems to have wandered in from another, rather better film.

That other, better film could well be Whit Stillman's 1998 movie The Last Days of Disco, which starred Sevigny (and Dan Ross, who has a minor role in Psycho) and explored upscale Manhattan clubs, bars and restaurants of the early 1980s. Stillman has many virtues, but visual flair isn't one of them. Disco, however, seems like a flamboyant feast for the eye in comparison with Psycho - run the two films' nightclub scenes one after the other and Harron's fundamental lack of directorial ability should become glaringly apparent, and it isn't just a matter of budget - Disco was a low-budget indie as well.

One comes away from American Psycho with the distinct impression that Harron and scriptwriter Guinevere Turner really despise Bret Easton Ellis's excellent source novel, and are determined to dissuade anybody from reading it. Which, coming from such creative featherweights as those two, takes some nerve.