Random Acts of Kindness: The Movie



Lost in Spacey: Haley Joel Osment gathers wisdom from Kevin Spacey.

Goodwill comes in threes in Pay it Forward.

by Cindy Fuchs

Pay It Forward

Directed by Mimi Leder
A Warner Bros. Release
Opens Friday at area theaters

Poor Trevor McKinney (Haley Joel Osment). He’s only in seventh grade and his life is full of worry. His mom, Arlene (Helen Hunt) works in a Las Vegas casino, is an alcoholic and has terrible bleached blond hair. His dad, Ricki (Jon Bon Jovi) is classic "deadbeat," showing up occasionally in order to beat up his mother. His grandmother, Grace (Angie Dickinson), lives in a station wagon.

And then, Trevor’s life changes. His new social studies teacher, Eugene Simonet (Kevin Spacey), gives the class a year-long project: Do something to change the world. Trevor decides to do "something big" for three people who "really need it," with the understanding that each will do the same for three more. Soon, the whole world will be populated by do-gooders.

Unfortunately, Trevor’s scheme takes the form of a quirky, heart-wrenching movie, accompanied by Thomas Newman’s quirky, charming, piano-tablas-dulcimer score, sounding much the same as he composed for Kevin Spacey’s 1999’s Oscar-winning movie, American Beauty. Actually, Pay It Forward is like American Beauty in a number of ways, none very flattering to either picture. Both feature a wise and martyred soul, recovered abuse victims and touching climaxes that let everyone walk out of the theater thinking they’re better people for understanding their transparent and supposedly profound "meanings."

Pay It Forward rigs these meanings via some tacky devices. First, it uses the homeless. (Though Preston Sturges managed this trick in Sullivan’s Travels, here it seems affected and patronizing.) Trevor’s first effort to put his plan into action has him stopping by the local homeless "area" and picking up a junkie named Jerry (James Caviezel), whom he brings home for a dinner of Cap’n Crunch and Pepsi.

Arlene is understandably upset when she learns that this stranger in her house is a homework assignment, and promptly rushes to Trevor’s school to tell off Eugene. Conveniently, she initiates the next step in Trevor’s plan, which is to get his mom and his favorite teacher together, made initially difficult by the facts that Eugene is a badly scarred burn victim and a self-conscious virgin, and Arlene is still willing to give Ricki another go, even after she promises never to hurt Eugene. Lesson to be learned: "Pay it forward" is a great idea, but it depends on people keeping promises, which most find very hard to do.

Pay It Forward pushes buttons, particularly through Osment, a born button-pusher, with his always-a-little-damp eyes, seeming frailty and adorably lilting voice. His co-stars are less successful stuck in melodramatic situations. When Arlene glugs a bottle of booze in the garage, Hunt looks a little too much like Courtney Thorne-Smith’s Alison looked during the couple of weeks she was an alcoholic on Melrose Place. Surely, Arlene has much to mourn (not least being her Erin Brockovich-style "low-class" midriff blouses), but you can’t help feeling that the film is only setting her up for upcoming developments, namely, her recovery and redemption.

Such heavy-handed plotting is more tedious than rousing. Directed by Mimi Leder, Pay It Forward is best when it works less hard, lets images rather than situations make its point — as when, while Eugene describes for his students the ways that their limited, 11-year-old perspectives might or might not have anything to do with a "global" network, the huge window behind him reveals the incredible Nevada vista, mountains and blue sky. More often, though, the movie loses perspective.