Emotion Clouds Much Of The Impact ‘Pay It Forward’ Could Have Had

Lester Burnham, Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty, might as well have been speaking about the actor himself when he memorably uttered the line, “I rule!” An Oscar winner for both Best Supporting Actor (The Usual Suspects) and Best Actor (American Beauty), Spacey has emerged as a king of his craft, able to make some films worthy of viewing solely because he is in them. His latest, Pay it Forward, also boasts the presence of wunderkind Haley Joel Osment, the exceptional child thespian (and Academy Award nominee for The Sixth Sense) with powers far beyond those of mortal men… or at least bounds beyond most actors even three times his age. These two, and the rapport they develop on screen, make Pay it Forward worth a look. Yet this film also falls short of all it could, and arguably should, have achieved.

Based on a novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde, Pay it Forward revolves around a school project devised by junior high school student Trevor McKinney (Osment). Spurred on by an assignment from his enigmatic, facially-scarred social studies teacher Eugene Simonet (Spacey), young Trevor concocts an altruistic plan based on the premise of doing something good for another person — something they can’t accomplish on their own — expecting only one thing in return: do a good deed for three other people… in other words, pay it forward.

The recipient of Trevor’s first act of kindness is a homeless man (James Caviezel) whom he brings unannounced into his house, thus alarming his mother, Arlene (Helen Hunt), a single mother and recovering alcoholic. She takes out her frustration upon Mr Simonet and the resulting friction between the two sets Trevor’s mental wheels in motion: what if he could play Cupid for Mr Simonet?

Pay it Forward is at its best when centered upon the troika of Eugene, Trevor and Arlene. In fact, there is more than enough there to sustain the weight of the film, but there is also a subplot involving a West Coast reporter (Jay Mohr) who begins tracking the pay-it-forward “movement” when a complete stranger gives him a brand new Mercedes after the journalist’s old car is trashed while in pursuit of a story.  The problem with this side detour is it adds some unnecessary camp and comedy to the proceedings as Mohr’s character comes into contact with a jive-talking felon (way over the top!) and a dingy bagwoman (played by a showily unkempt Angie Dickinson).

These tales add little to the film and, if anything, just serve as unwanted distraction from the film’s stronger facets, which are undoubtedly the sturdy performances of Spacey and Osment.  They give real dimension to their characters and resist the temptation to go overboard or get campy with some fairly melodramatic material.

Unfortunately, such a subtle approach is not uniformly shared by their director, Mimi Leder. From this reviewer’s standpoint, Pay it Forward is Leder’s best cinematic effort yet (her other films include The Peacemaker and Deep Impact), but she still has yet to match the more raw, stripped-down drama she achieved as one of the top directors for ER during that show’s first few seasons. At the helm of a motion picture, she tends to overplay her hand and overwork the sentimentality of her script rather than trust the flow and pace of the plot as she did in ER. (Pace was particularly a problem in Deep Impact.)  She nearly wins us over with Pay it Forward, but her tendency to go for big, sweepingly emotional moments takes some of the lasting impact of the film away. It’s hard not to be moved by the movie as it plays out, but by the end, you begin feeling just a tad bit worked over.

Pay it Forward is rated PG-13 for language, mature thematic material, sexual situations and brief violence.  Its religious overtones are hard to ignore — Trevor a Christ-figure? — and relatively thought-provoking, but the film only yet begins to scratch the surface of all it could have been.