Psycho Dribble
Mary Harron's adaptation of the grisly novel just can't hack it.

AMERICAN PSYCHO
With Christian Bale, Jared Leto, Willem Dafoe, Reese Witherspoon, Chloe Sevigny
Screenplay by Guinevere Turner and Mary Harron, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
Directed by Mary Harron

PATRICK BATEMAN, A BUFF, HANDSOME, fastidious, health-conscious, 27-year-old Wall Street stud at the prestigious Pierce & Pierce, has something that’s firm and white and pointy that he likes to whip out and show people: It’s his new business card, printed on the finest stock and embossed with tastefully chic lettering.

The other young studs at P&P have new cards, too. So one day around a conference table, everyone whips his out, and when they’ve all laid their cards on the table, everyone grudgingly agrees that Paul Allen’s is the most majestic.

For Patrick (Christian Bale) - who lives in a shimmering white apartment with great light on West 81st, and who has already told us, "There is no real me, I simply am not there" - this can only mean one thing: Paul Allen must die.

So, too, must about 20 other people (Patrick loses count) in Mary Harron’s ashen film version of American Psycho, the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel that the author’s original publisher refused to issue, claiming its sex and violence sickened him. To be sure, if Harron had faithfully depicted even a fraction of Ellis' hackings, flayings and mutilations, she would have lost any hope of finding an audience (not that it should matter when you're making art). But I’m surprised that the audacious director of I Shot Andy Warhol went this far in turning the novel into something quite so insipid.

In one way or another, both versions of American Psycho casually attribute Patrick’s homicidal tendencies to the time and culture in which he lives: This is Ronnie Reagan’s materialistic, somnambulistic, relativistic 1980s America - the TV news shows Reagan explaining away Iran-Contra and appointing Robert Bork to the Supreme Court - and naturally, Patrick runs with the egoistic Wall Street wolves who eat at fine restaurants where the special of the night is free range rabbit.

To visualize Patrick’s violence, Harron mostly employs discreet pools of blood and the occasional splatter on Patrick’s face and clothing. She doesn’t permit even a glimpse of metal near flesh, cutting away before Patrick’s weapons make first contact, as if she refuses to sate our cultural blood lust. Patrick’s virtuoso killing involves a chain saw, but it’s so surreally over-the-top that Harron clearly wants us to consider it absurd. Her sex is almost as frustrating: She shows no genitalia, and in a tame threesome, we mostly see Patrick flexing his muscles and looking at himself in his well-mirrored bedroom.

So rather than grossing us out with Patrick’s improprieties, or titillating us with good dirty sex, Harron gives us the idea of things and then moves on to make an ultra-black comedy about the Armani culture of high living and sexual amorality that creates a monster who gives his victims brainy lectures on pop music - like "In Too Deep" and "It’s Hip To Be Square" - then kills them as the tunes blare on his exquisite home stereo.

These are old jokes, recycled through Harron’s cool eye but old nonetheless. Her movie plods along from killing to killing, pausing to take familiar swipes at our post-modern, multi-media culture of greed and fame. You keep waiting for something provocative or fresh to occur, but it just never takes off or finds its own place.

Reese Witherspoon and Chloe Sevigny have whiny supporting roles as, respectively, Patrick’s fiancee and secretary, both of whom ultimately get the short end of his stick. Willem Dafoe is a detective who may or may not be on Patrick’s trail, and a nondescipt Jared Leto plays Paul Allen, who gets axed in the first reel for being a good-natured chump.

As Patrick, Christian Bale certainly has presence in American Psycho, and his performance is accomplished and well-rehearsed. But it’s not the kind of role an actor can really impress you with because it’s so transparent and contrived. In a few scenes he struts like a peacock on toot, and he speaks his lines with a haughty, nasal, metropolitan accent that makes him sound like a sloppy Whit Stillman leftover. Harron no doubt wanted him to appears as hollow on the outside as Patrick tells us he is on the inside. As a concept we get the joke, but when Patrick is the only character who talks like this, it quickly becomes self-conscious, as if Bale is trying too hard and Harron didn't have the judgment to pull him back.

Most puzzling of all, Harron rewrites the ending of the novel in a way that’s more than just hackneyed and dissatisfying: Where Ellis’ Patrick has trouble with propriety, Harron’s has trouble with - no, I won’t risk giving it away, even though it’s not worth the time to find out for yourself. Just trust me: It's a big difference, and Harron's’s version of the story allows us to find a comfort zone.

When American Psycho ends, you immediately get the feeling that they never should have bothered to make it at all. Ellis wrote the kind of headline-grabbing novel that virtually dared Hollywood to take a stab at it, and for a while Leonardo DiCaprio had considered playing Patrick - in which case, Harron said, she would have left the project. But now that she’s made the movie her own way, she leaves you with nothing much to ponder or disturb. In the staring match between author and filmmaker, Harron blinked.