American Psycho – Uncut Version

Bret Easton Ellis' dark and violent satire of America in the 1980s is brought to the screen in this unsettling drama with black comic overtones. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), the son of a wealthy Wall Street financier, is pursuing his own lucrative career with his father's firm. Bateman is the prototypical yuppie, obsessed with success, fashion, and style. He is also a serial killer who murders, rapes, and mutilates both strangers and acquaintances without provocation or reason. Donald Kimble (Willem Dafoe), a police detective, questions Bateman about the disappearance of Paul Allen (Jared Leto), whom Patrick murdered several days earlier. As Kimble stays on Bateman's trail, Bateman's mask of studied, distant cool begins to fall apart. American Psycho also features Reese Witherspoon as Bateman's girlfriend, as well as Samantha Mathis, Chloe Sevigny, and Guinevere Turner; the latter also co-authored the screenplay. Controversy followed the production from the start, when speculation that Leonardo Di Caprio would play Bateman sparked concerns that he would lure preteens to an R-rated movie. Di Caprio soon bowed out of the project, and original leading man Bale was reinstated. Later, a group of Toronto residents attempted to block filming in that city after Canadian serial killer Paul Bernardo claimed that Ellis' novel inspired his murder spree. — Mark Deming

Review:
The greed, cynicism and selfishness of the '80s young urban professional got a ribbing in the novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, the Gen-X scribe's answer to author Tom Wolfe's broader The Bonfire of the Vanities (it's no coincidence that the main character of Ellis' novel works for the same, aptly titled firm, Pierce and Pierce, that employed the protagonist of Bonfire). In the hands of independent director Mary Harron, however, Ellis' novel becomes something else entirely: a feminist treatise on the misogyny and vanity of men. Although not totally eschewing the bloody violence of her source material, Harron finds creative ways to ignore most of the gore and focuses instead on the rampaging self-absorption of Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a Wall Street shark so devoid of feeling that even he describes himself as not having "a single identifiable human emotion." Harron's interpretation of Bateman and Bale's icy, aloof performance are at odds with some of the film's dialogue, however: a gallows humor that doesn't fit is revealed when Bateman tells a woman not that he's in mergers and acquisitions but "murders and executions." As well as this dissonance between the Bateman who's seen and the one who's heard, a jarring conclusion leaves open to interpretation the reality of the tale's events, an element that vexed many readers of Ellis' novel. Harron keeps the book's tongue-in-cheek humor and body count but does not fix any of the book's problems, even compounding some of them by changing the focus of the tale away from period social satire, an artistic choice that negatively affects the coherence of the adaptation. — Karl Williams