Pay It Forward

"Pay it Forward" is one of the better-acted bad movies in recent memory. It stars Kevin Spacey as Eugene Simonet, a seventh-grade social studies teacher, who one fine first day of school comes into contact with the remarkable Trevor McKinney, played by Haley Joel Osment. As he does every year, Simonet gives his new students an assignment in which he asks them to come up with one way to change the world for the better. Most of the class devises projects either unoriginal and well-meaning or original and stupid, but Trevor comes up with a plan to get everyone to "pay it forward"; that is, Trevor will do one huge, life-transforming favor for three people, who each have to do a huge favor for three other people, and so forth until huge favors spread across the nation.

Simonet is impressed, but Trevor's alcoholic cocktail waitress mom Arlene, played by Helen Hunt, is somewhat dubious. She's even more skeptical when Trevor decides to set Simonet up with her, as Trevor's favor to his favorite teacher. Everyone involved must confront a whole raft of deep-seated issues as the idea of "paying it forward" spreads throughout the land.

Movies that have uplifting messages about sacrifice and the essential goodness of human nature, like "Pay it Forward," are often quite lazily scripted and directed, again like "Pay it Forward." First and foremost, the dialogue and plot move in easily predictable ways, and their predictability drains the film of its drama. But that's just the tip of the shoddy-construction iceberg here. Rarely in recent years have we had a film as hateful towards women as "Pay it Forward"; every female character in here is a drunk who ruins the life of the rest of her family, and Simonet at one point rhetorically asks Arlene "how women like you can be so stupid." The one minority character is written as a violent, larcenous fool with the obligatory good heart.

In addition, director Mimi Leder does not seem to have any shots in her arsenal to depict interpersonal drama besides the extreme close-up, and those shots are not particularly effective when the film is full of them. Leder also allows some hyperbolically dumb music to intrude on otherwise nicely emotional dialogue, and generally seems intent on taking situations and emotions which are already clichés and undermining them by emphasizing them beyond any reasonable tolerance.

Yet the talented cast almost manages the miracle of making "Pay it Forward" work. All three main actors are given sketchy, somewhat unrealistic characters and make them into three-dimensional humans. Spacey takes seemingly unrelated bits of dialogue and personality that he finds in the script and make them form a coherent whole. For example, Simonet has suffered burns which left him with visible scars, and the pain Simonet feels about them is obvious, yet Spacey cannily understates this pain to compensate for the script's over-emphasis of the issue, and makes it feel real. Hunt, too, takes her monstrously unsympathetic character and makes it whole with things like a shaky stare, a certain walk, an unexpected tremor in her voice. And Osment has the biggest challenge of all, since he plays what is essentially a saint. His marvelous ability to command the screen and make himself sympathetic almost convinces you that he could be the holy man the movie wants him to be.

And you want to be sympathetic to a film which has such an uplifting message, except that the message itself manages one last trick to undermine the actors who deliver it. After a while, it becomes apparent that the idea of "paying it forward" — doing big favors with no way to be sure that they will be returned unto others — has become more of a device to bring Hunt and Spacey together than an actual philosophy. And even then, if one is prepared to grant the movie its slight deviation from its own supposed driving idea, the final five minutes of this film are an absolute tidal wave of suffocating melodrama, completely unjustified by what has come before. If Spacey, Hunt and Osment had been in almost any other film, the odds are that they could have carried the day. As it is, you'll be doing yourself a huge favor if you don't "Pay it Forward." Tell three other people, too.

Dramas Home

Movie Reviews Home

Spam-O-Matic Home