|
Pay
It Forward
Rated PG-13
Opens Friday,
Oct. 20
Pay
It Forward also stars Jay Mohr, Angie Dickinson and
The Thin Red Line's Jim Caviezel.
| |
Each fall a handful of movies have the privilege and/or burden
of basking in pre-Oscar buzz. And like the Oscar winners that
come several months later, some deserve it and some don't.
Last year American Beauty parlayed this attention
into five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and a Best
Actor trophy for Kevin Spacey. Never mind that American
Beauty's acidic tone was unfocused, its script drunk
on its own profundity. The Academy couldn't shake the early-established
notion that this was the movie of the year.
Now this season's first whispers are going to another Spacey
drama, Pay It Forward. It says a lot about the actor's
place in Hollywood: When he appeared eight years ago in
David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, Spacey was "the
other guy" in a cast that included Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino.
But since his Oscar-winning turn in The Usual Suspects,
Spacey has been a Tinseltown speedball with a receding hairline.
Like American Beauty, however, Pay It Forward
features an excellent Spacey performance drowned in overwrought
filmmaking artifice. If American Beauty was a rabid
sitcom, Pay It Forward is an after-school special
with an Oscar pedigree.
Based on the novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde and set in a
lower-class Las Vegas neighborhood of ranch houses decaying
beyond the glare of casinos, Pay It Forward begins
with a fascinating idea posited by scrawny middle-school
student Trevor McKinney (The Sixth Sense's Haley
Joel Osment). When new teacher Eugene Simonet (Spacey) challenges
Trevor's class to change the world, Trevor actually comes
up with a system to do it: Perform three favors for three
people, "something big," says Trevor, "something they can't
do themselves." In return, only ask that they do the same
for three others. First explored in Douglas Sirk's Magnificent
Obsession, Pay It Forward's angelic Amway-style
scheme entices us with the beauty-pageant school of reason:
that making the world a better place really isn't so complicated
after all.
Before Trevor's idea can be explored in any kind of meaningful
way, however, the plot turns toward hackneyed melodrama.
Trevor's greatest ambition is not to change the world, but
to play matchmaker between his teacher, who is covered in
burn scars, and his cocktail-waitress mother (Helen Hunt),
whose alcoholism is a constant albatross. You know the drill:
Mom will bring Eugene out of his disfigured shell, and Eugene
will be the new father that Trevor needs. (Poor Trevor's
real dad looks an awful lot like Jon Bon Jovi.) There is
an interesting side-plot about the future outgrowth of the
Pay It Forward movement, but it's merely an occasional
diversion in service to this by-the-numbers story. And perhaps
worst of all, the ending is ridiculously over-the-top. (Get
out your cigarette lighters.) Former ER director
Mimi Leder desperately wants your eyes to water, but unless
you're a PR goon they'll probably just roll behind
your head.
|
