Pay It Back
by Sasha Stone

It's hard to be a saint in the city, especially in Las Vegas. Yet one was born when an eleven-year-old boy named Trevor (Haley Joel Osment) elevates a class assignment given by his teacher, Mr. Simonet (Kevin Spacey), to devise a plan to change the world. Trevor takes the assignment seriously, and carefully lays out a plan on how people can become decent by paying an act of kindness forward, instead of back. If he can help three people, then the plan might have a chance of working, because then they'll help three friends, and so on. But Trevor is having some problems changing a world that won't be changed - evil has too tight a grip. Mothers drink and let abusive men knock them around. Teachers with disfiguring facial scars won't allow themselves to love and be loved because their inner scars won't heal, they are too deep. And protecting a misfit classmate from the fists of bullies proves the biggest challenge of all. Paying it forward requires you "do something big," and that usually means giving up the beloved crutch, whatever it may be. 

Despite the wonderful performances of Osment, Helen Hunt as Trevor's cocktailing, drunken mom, and a surprising turn by Policewoman Angie Dickinson, Pay it Forward hobbles along like a three-legged dog. It is so close to being there - like a sneeze that never finds a release - but it ends up cheapening any real sentiment the novel provided.

Kevin Spacey has never been bad in a film, though this gig could be that role singled out in years to come as one of his worst when it should have been one of his best. There are those of us gals who have waited patiently for Spacey to move out of playing character roles and into playing leading men. Now that he's secure as a romantic lead, we can feel comfortable in our undying lust. Here the word "ham" would not be out of line. He definitely has his moments, but he's doing Eugene O'Neill in what amounts to an episode of Touched by an Angel.

Spacey aside, the film flip-flops too quickly, thus leaving an agitated, frustrated viewer. Just when the Spacey/Hunt love story heats up, we're thrust into the forced "theme" of how the "Pay it Forward movement" is infecting awful people everywhere. We don't care about it or the characters involved in it. We only care about the teacher with burn scars and his alchy girlfriend. It's safe to say that this film would have been a great one without the "pay it forward" hook. The magnetic force is on the relationships between the kid, his mother and the new man in their lives. Mr. Simonet's past is similar to his present in a way that good stories are made on - the threat of repetition and the mystery of attraction; why a man would suddenly feel something for someone who is an unhealthy choice.

Pay it Forward needed a healthy dose of David Mamet or Russell Banks along the lines of Affliction. We are talking about some serious issues here like spousal and child abuse, and alcoholism, yet this film naively wants us to believe it can be all better with an optimistic prayer of one child. Moreover, it's insulting, even cheap, in the way it plays up some of the worst afflictions human beings can suffer like they were insignificant details that get in the way of the plot: homelessness and drug addiction.

One notable positive in a film with so many negatives is the setting - the outskirts of Las Vegas, that, for anyone who's ever been there, is startling in its expression of lonely isolation. Vegas is not a city that should always be seen from the outskirts of town in the daytime - it is forever exposed for those who live there, and the magic will never return.

With such a fine cast and the perfect metaphor of time and place, and with an entire staff of women behind the film, led by director Leder, and screenwriter Leslie Dixon (The Thomas Crown Affair), and based on the Catherine Ryan Hyde novel, it's a shame the film is such a failure. Women directors are few and far between these days, even though there are more than ever. But female director or no, this film is shabbily constructed, poorly written, and ultimately an embarrassment to self-respecting saints in every city.

In truth, Pay it Forward never should have made it to the big screen. As a movie-of-the-week millions of people could have watched and cried and perhaps started their own movement of paying it forward. As a night at the movies, however, one has every right to hold the theatre accountable for paying every dollar of it back.

CineScene, 2000