Pay it Forward
“It’s like your big chance to fix something that’s not your bike …
... you can fix a person ...”
Like I said the other day with ‘The Last Mimzy, I tend to come to movies I love – especially the ones I haven’t reviewed yet here – for repeat viewings with pretty insane trepidation. When I’m watching those movies again with someone who’s never seen them before? It’s even worse – for some reason I find myself being even more critical of a movie than I’d ever been on my lonesome, thinking of things that person I’m watching with might find hokey or whatever. That was the case here, I spotted everything.
But I love this movie so much. I mean, just the basic idea is so perfect, it’d be seriously hard to screw up the delivery. Open with the first main scene with Kevin Spacey – truly one of the great teacher scenes of all time, immediately hooks you in – and so much humour and even cliché throughout that it’s amazing how real the whole thing still feels thanks to Mimi Leder’s direction – and an emotional climax that leaves you drowning, and, I have to say, you’ve got yourself the perfect movie.
I think this was given something of a bad time coming so soon after American Beauty (eek! another movie that really needs a review here lol). Given just Kevin Spacey and a typical Thomas Newman score, it’s literally impossible to not make the comparison, and the utopian message doesn’t help. But I think there are so many great moments here that make it its own – I mean god, just take a scene at random, Haley Joel Osment putting underarm roll deodorant on Helen Hunt … how many times could you film an 11-year-old boy doing that and make it look so not awkward? And the scene between Kevin Spacey and Hunt, when he walks away from her, turns, shakes, ending with her saying, “I can’t reject you, you’re too quick for me!” Osment saying, “The world’s just shit,” Osment saying, “The world’s not exactly … shit.” That jump Jim Caviezel makes following the line, “Have a cup of coffee with me?” And the “What is it with women like you?” scene that I find personally one of the most emotionally draining scene in recent memory. When even the most simple exchange like – “I’m sorry. I think I made a mistake.” “It’s okay. Everybody makes mistakes.” – rings so beautifully true, I don’t know, I think you’re onto a winner. I can even forgive the too-melodramatic, questionably comic moment where Hunt slaps Osment and ransacks the house for her booze, ‘cos Hunt’s performance absolutely makes that character scenario seem perfectly possible in reality.
As I said, it’s a good story, a good simple idea, to start with – so much so that you almost couldn’t mess it up in making it into a movie. The performances, the intricate arrangement of timelines, the music, and any other randomness that occurs along the way, are pure icing on an already pretty damn perfect cake. I really hold this one close, it’s beautiful. I mean I have a soft spot for any movie that suggests kids are capable of amazing things and in that regard, this is gold, but I mean, still, even casting that aside, this is something else.