NRO Weekend, October 21-22, 2000
Pay It Some Attention
A tear-jerking humanist fable.

By Ben Domenech, NRO Contributing Editor---------------btdome@wm.edu

efore you go to see Pay It Forward — and you should see it — be prepared: This is a well-acted film, a crowd pleaser, full of wonderful tiny moments that inspire a nostalgic longing for the days of Capra-esque movie magic. It is also schmaltzy, cheap, and manipulative, slamming you over the head with all the bluntly mawkish sentimentality of an on-screen Hallmark card.

Directed by Mimi Leder (fresh from her work on Deep Impact and The Peacemaker) and screenwriter Leslie Dixon, Pay it Forward is exactly the type of film that the casual moviegoer will love, and critics will pan. Adapted from Catherine Ryan Hyde's best-selling utopian novel, and featuring some great performances from Oscar-winners Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt, and that boy genius of the cinema, Haley Joel Osment, Pay it Forward runs like a two-hour advertisement for the Academy's judges.

The story revolves around the young Trevor McKinney (Osment), who receives the following assignment from seventh-grade social-studies teacher Eugene Simonet (Spacey): "Think of an idea to change our world — and put it into action." Most kids come up with plans to put up recycling flyers or clean up the neighborhood, but Trevor's idea astounds even his teacher: "Do something nice for someone who really needs help — it has to be something hard, something they can't do for themselves — and in return, that person passes on the gesture to three other people; they pay the kindness forward." It's a humanist pyramid scheme; but when the naively youthful Osment is asked whether the plan might be "overly utopian," relying as it does on an act of faith in "the goodness of people," the boy's wonderfully optimistic reply is "So?"

But it isn't the script that makes this movie: it's the performances. Helen Hunt, Osment's alcoholic mother, may not have the chemistry with Spacey we're supposed to believe she has (the boy tries to set the two of them up), but she is very believable as a woman just barely holding herself together. Watching Hunt, you see what Julia Roberts was trying to do with her role in Erin Brockovich; bottle blond, with a cheap perm and garish makeup, Hunt lets herself look like hell, and pulls off an award-worthy study in trailer trash. Jay Mohr (Jerry Maguire, Go) is smarmy, charming, and pulls it off like only he (and maybe Bill Murray) can. Jim Caviezel is great as always, with a relatively small role as a timid, shy vagrant. And Jon Bon Jovi, who's only in three scenes, seems to have a knack for playing drunk jerks.

But more than anything, this is Osment's film. The boy wonder who delighted audiences and critics alike in Forrest Gump and The Sixth Sense has already developed into an astonishing young actor. Serious, intelligent, with an angelic beauty, and child-like passion, Osment is an extraordinary young talent. In this film, it's obvious that Osment has honed his skill even more under Spacey's unconscious tutelage. There's one moment, where Osment sits on a stool, swinging his feet around happily, a bright smile on his face, that seems to capture all the innocence and energy of youth. This twelve-year-old is just getting started.

Despite Pay It Forward's brutally sentimental script and inexcusably exploitative ending (the last shot looks more than a little like another well-acted emotional wringer, Field of Dreams), this film's excellent performances and Oscar-destined status make it worth seeing. Just don't go into the theater expecting Capra. And read some Florence King afterwards, just to regain some cynicism.