Good Intentions, Bad Film

Something's wrong with Kevin Spacey's face. At first you think it's just a case of bad lighting. But soon you realize this is scar tissue--not enough to turn him into a grotesque, but plenty to explain why his Eugene Simonet, a junior high social-science teacher, is prissy, overintellectual and socially withdrawn.

He is, of course, a victim of the Joan Crawford syndrome: messed up, but as curable, psychologically speaking, as the scarred stars of ancient weepies always were. Like them, he just needs to be loved. And Arlene McKinney (Helen Hunt) is the girl to do it. She, naturally, has her own problems. She's a single mom, a waitress working extra shifts at a topless bar while she struggles with alcoholism; she hides her bottle in a chandelier, just as Ray Milland did in The Lost Weekend. But there's good stuff in her too.

Better still, she has a saintly son, Trevor (Haley Joel Osment), who is eager to bring these two damaged creatures together for purposes of mutual redemption. He also has bigger plans. Responding to an assignment from Mr. Simonet, who asks his students to come up with a plan to improve the world, he invents the Pay It Forward plan. His idea is to do good deeds for three people, each of whom does the same for three more individuals and so on--until, presumably, peace is established in the Middle East. This is not dissimilar to Frank Capra's John Doe movement and, indeed, the movie ends on a populist-sentimental note that's in Capra's vein, but shamelessly so. It's Capra-corn without the Capra craft.

These antique movie references are not coincidental. Surely Mimi Leder, the director, and screenwriter Leslie Dixon had them in mind. They are, however, of interest largely to students of cliches and their maddening persistence in popular culture. Leder and Dixon are more up to date. Theirs is an epic of au courant abuse and unlikely but inspirational redemption.

How did Eugene come by his scars? Why, long ago, his evil father dumped a can of gasoline on him and lit a match. Why is Arlene a drunk? Well, you see, her mother was a bag lady and her former husband a wife beater. Why is Trevor such a shy and skittish little do-gooder? Because he's afraid his nasty dad will return--can you guess whether he does or not?--and start hitting him too.

The makers of Pay It Forward know misery must be occasionally relieved. They give Spacey some funny curmudgeonly lines to snap in his American Beauty way. They let him hide his worst scars under his shirt, so they are revealed only when Hunt finally, gently touches them in the half-light of her bedroom. And Osment gets a couple of moments to reveal his inner Beaver.

We're supposed to feel sorry for these people, and be inspired by their brave struggles to recover from all those wounds. But some of us are bound to take umbrage at the film's vulgar manipulations. Set in terminally tacky Las Vegas, Pay It Forward is as rigged as a casino slot machine, preying on people's hopes but paying off only for the house.