Watching three actors of this stature struggle with a script that ultimately insults the audience is painful, especially when the premise, cleverly done, might just have given us the kick in the pants we all need.
PAY IT FORWARD
A Nebbadoon review by Joan Ellis.
Sometimes movies just slip away even when we're rooting for them. Pay It Forward does just that in spite of the presence of two Oscar-winning performers and a competent child actor. The problem is Leslie Dixon's script. It tries to manipulate us emotionally on all levels, an unnecessary failing when you have on board the likes of Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, and Haley Joel Osment. Skilled in nuance, each of them is forced to deal repeatedly with the obvious.
Covered with makeup and hair of many colors, Helen Hunt plays Arlene McKinney, a single mother living in a low-slung house on the edge of a trailer park. Arlene can make it through the various humiliations of her job as a bar waitress in Las Vegas, but when she finally goes home, one awful reality or another sends her to the bottles she has stashed all around her house for just such moments. A member of AA, she knows what she has to do, but life sends too many daggers her way. Finally it sends her Eugene Simonet (Kevin Spacey). Eugene is the newly arrived seventh-grade teacher, and he is about to upset the collective apple cart. Eugene's face is a map of serious burn scars that rivet the class, including Trevor, Arlene's serious son. On his first day, Mr. Simonet writes an assignment on the board and gives the class a year to deal with it: The world we live in is a messed-up place, or words to that effect. Fix it.
The stage is set for a series of good deeds as Trevor tries to make random acts of kindness add up to "doing something for people that they can't do for themselves." No mere carrying the grocery bags in this assignment. He decides to set his mother up with his teacher, a neat solution for two unhappy people, but Mr. Simonet is so shy and stuttery he can't even find a way to invite Arlene to the coffee shop. Kevin Spacey endows Eugene Simonet with tenderness, but still holds back some part of himself from the audience-a quality that makes us pay attention whenever he's on screen.
The annoyance factor in this disappointing movie ratchets upward as three fine actors deal with the bad cards they've been dealt. They try at every turn to create some sort of visible symbol that our toxic culture might change if each of us committed three acts of kindness, a kind of chain letter to the future with the same lousy odds. But they are undermined at every turn by a script that telegraphs its emotions and manipulates ours. It is indeed surprising that the actors make it as palatable as they do.
Watching three actors of this stature struggle with a script that ultimately insults the audience is painful, especially when the premise, cleverly done, might just have given us the kick in the pants we all need.