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As a film fan you come to a point where you study film and try to understand the roots of the genres you enjoy. Of course there are levels to film enjoyment, and over the last few years, I’ve come to be a big fan of film and the process of producing films, which puts me in a strange position of always knowing about films before they have even started shooting. In some respects, though, the enjoyment of watching films can become degraded. The more you know about a film, the insider buzz, problems on the set and the fundamental process of film creation, the more you destroy your suspension of disbelief.
And suspension of disbelief is important in film. The better you can immerse yourself in the experience, the more likely you are to forgive any weakness and flaws the film might have in pursuit of it’s eventual goal, which is always sharing a story to entertain you. On the other hand, the more you study film, whether it is in an academic context or in a fervent armchair student kinda way, you begin to develop perspective. Suddenly you understand why Arnold will never do Shakespeare, but Mel Gibson, while being a superstar, is also able to bring you into his character, that he can still surprise you with his range. Your sense of expectation is raised, though; your understanding of the film’s attempts to manipulate you will often offend you and leave you uninterested.
In the movie Pay It Forward a wonderful production team comes together with a challenging concept: create a movie that originated from one of those odd little inspirational books, which had strange inspiration and a good solid pitch from Oprah’s diligent book club. Somehow, though, after seeing the public’s and critics’ response, you might think that turning The Celestine Prophecy into an action-suspense movie would be easier and more enjoyable for an audience.
On a pop culture level it is likely that Pay It Forward, which pulled at every emotional string in our bodies, failed on a fundamental level. Despite the fact that it was built on flawed characters who had heavily clichéd albatrosses around their necks, not to mention an equally burdened let’s-make-a-difference plot, the premise wasn’t horrible, a bit whitebread, but not horrible. The movie was even able to make you feel the turnaround in the characters’ lives. They made their way down an Oz-like spiral of sadness and many years of sleepwalking lives, but about two-thirds into the movie it somehow worked. I could hear a collective sigh as the audience was happy not to have to dislike Helen Hunt; glad that the character played by Kevin Spacey had shaken some of his shame and pain.
Haley Joel Osment, an incredible child actor, had that glow that only child actors can achieve after they know that they have successfully turned the plot of a movie around. Everything came together and then we were shown how it would unravel, how every great movement deserves a great leader and demands he be a martyr, whether he wants to be or not.
Pay It Forward is one of those movies that, by the time you finish watching its opening segments, you know how it will play out. The enjoyment for the movie watcher, who already instinctively knows the direction of the piece, is whether or not the production will do something to surprise you and make an original twist in its established premise. The question is if they’ll rework a successful concept, take it’s pitch, and turn it around to appeal to a different demographic.
Pay It Forward played to middle America, not its boisterous city cousins. Pay It Forward is American Beauty without the weed, sex and dirt, a movie that you don’t mind your children watching cause you feel it has a better message, something which is a bit sad, from start to finish, but you’re not supposed to feel bad when you leave, you’re suppose to remember how it all turned around, how happiness was achieved and that the message is more then the sum of its parts. Those parts are roughly seven dollars and a few hours of your time.
To do this, the film pushes us to feel no sympathy for, even dislike, its characters. It was risky and interesting to watch; even Haley Joel Osment, who you’d expect the film crew to make the cute, uplifting, smart-alecky kid, was also painted in a negative light, so you really do get suckered by it. Everyone had a trait which kept them seemingly intolerable, so that that the viewer comes back later and almost feels bad for not realizing that “we all can change.”
The true premise of Pay it Forward is not the whole stupid pay it forward gimmick--that’s for the mainstream, who will look no further and will forget Pay It Forward as quickly as they did the fact that the lunch they got was chosen from a numbered pictogram. We will disregard the mainstream audience reaction for a moment and look at what the creators were trying to really do with Pay It Forward, which was to tell a tale about self-discovery and self worth, and how the first person you must pay has to be yourself.
The thing with people is that personal failure goes a long way in defeating the human spirit. We lose our sense of personal courage and we fold into ourselves. Failure becomes a black hole which crushes everything that enters our orbit. Pay It Forward takes three major characters, along with various supporting characters, and shows us how they are all a bit bitter in their perspective towards life and how they have kinda given up on it. Tweak the plot a notch to the right and it’d be a excellent religious propaganda film, twist it to the left and it’d be a horrible sappy cable film on Lifetime. As a mainstream film, it follows quickly in the wake of American Beauty, and shares much of its roots, origins, and symbolism. What it lacks it the weed, brilliant rage, indignation and kink that made American Beauty a successful studio picture.
Let’s talk about American Beauty for a second. Here’s a movie in which one character’s life changes strike a chain reaction in the characters around him. Lester Burnham has something happen to him; he wakes up, he meets a girl who is so disturbingly sexy that Lester is brought to a new perspective. The change in Lester effects his wife, daughter and everyone else, whether they understand it or not. Pay It Forward strikes the same chain reaction, without the selfish pleasure. The American Beauty characters all jump into losing their inhibitions and doing things they have never done before. Lester wakes up, gets in shape, smokes dope and quits his bullshit job; his wife has an affair and his daughter ditches her high school angst to actually work on rebellion and happiness.
In Pay It Forward, the characters struggle with the heavy sadness of the realization that life is about as good as it gets. Lester Burnham of American Beauty and Trevor McKinney (Haley Joel Osment’s character in Pay It Forward) are used for the same effect, to strike a catalyst that changes the lives of the characters around them. We just happen to like the way American Beauty walked us through it; there was less pain and string-pulling. American Beauty is a good headfuck which warns you what’s going to happen, yet somehow makes your forget its early warning, making it all the more powerful. Pay It Forward fucks with your head, too, it first sells itself as a bullshit movie and then turns around, makes you like it, and then rips you apart.
So you are left with a movie which is entirely character-driven and quirkily mocks itself in its overtly cynical perspective on the whole “pay it forward” theory. For ninety percent of the movie we are told to not only dislike the characters, but that no one takes this pay it forward gimmick thing to heart, until the end. In the end, everything is right, everything is coming together, we like the characters, we see Shane riding off in the sunset and we know that he is in fact alive. And then, we are told that the minor characters have a great time getting together and moving on, while the main characters, the originators of the concept, had to pay the price and sacrifice themselves. We in the audience can feel bad, not only for not liking the characters, but for not believing the whole pay it forward theory as well. Shame on us cynical city folk, or was it middle America?
Middle America would have gladly paid for a happy ending, maybe not enough to make a big-production Hollywood movie, but I think it had a chance. The city folk probably wondered where the weed, sex and evil in the characters was. It was odd to watch the movie try to resolve these two points. At the movie’s worst points, I bolstered my suspension of disbelief with sandbags filled with the delusion that I was watching a movie on TLC with my girlfriend at home. And while I knew what the end would be, I was surprised and actually touched by how they milked it for all it was worth. Any director who can do what they did with the ending, and then try to turn it around for one more last chance at showing us inspiration, has balls.
And I did shed a movie tear. I liked it, it got me, it was a good setup, minus the Lifetime heaviness at times, but that was an intentional part of the setup and I like a good head fuck at times. It’s an interesting movie to watch, though I’d definitely say watch American Beauty first and then watch how Pay It Forward rips it off. With a score by Thomas Newman, who also did the eerie music for American Beauty, it’s intriguing to watch how American Beauty, which I actually found to be a exciting and shocking movie, succeeded, whereas Pay It Forward failed and was the first big movie to truly infuriate the critics since they misunderstood Fight Club.
