Director Mimi Leder has a reputation for making movies for people who hate movies. One of the shocking facts derived from a light education in film history is that television was the breeding ground for some of the most visually exciting filmmakers of the early 1960s: John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, and I think John Cassevetes. They did everything live and catered to an elite, educated audience (the few people who owned televisions back then). But then the format became widespread and the infiltration by the masses demanded mass production. Now television is seen as the breeding ground for filmmakers like Mimi Leder, workhorses that didn't get into the industry for a love of film.

Leder cut her teeth on one-hour dramas like ER, L.A. Law, and China Beach and a few made-for-TV movies of little note before helming her (and Dreamworks Studios') first feature The Peacemaker. While not an incredible piece of work by any means, that film managed to coast by with the presence of stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. Lightning did not strike twice with her second picture Deep Impact. Despite a star-studded cast (Elijah Wood, Leelee Sobieski, Robert Duvall, Morgan Freeman, Jon Favreau, James Cromwell and Toad from American Grafitti), Deep Impact was a snoozefest with bargain bin CGI effects and a monotonous browbeating visual style. Sitting in the theater, I felt infuriated at the audience that I was watching it with; I felt hatred for them, I held them responsible for paying to see the film and thus perpetuating its existence and the existence of films like it. Of course, being a paying customer myself, I then felt implicated and then finally humiliated.

Leder does not make intelligent films, but she understands how to mimic gravitas by removing all the pleasurable aspects of junk films, knowing that her audience of masochist housewives will equate sensory deprivation with emotional, perhaps even intellectual sophistication. I'm making Leder sound like a cynic, but from what I have seen of her in interviews and on the audio commentary that accompanies Pay It Forward she's just your garden variety moron. I think that she genuinely hates the movies. She advertises herself as an "action" director, but of course she has no love of the genre; she labels herself an action director, I think, to make the point that action movies don't have to be "stupid" (read stimulating) but can be "smart" (read boring and vaguely political in an entirely uncontroversial way). But I also think that she believes in these movies, that she really thinks that she is making good films that she would personally want to see.

The good news about Pay It Forward is that Leder has allowed all those pleasurable aspects of junk films in. This is an electric, often powerfully cinematic film. Unlike Deep Impact, it's difficult not to be affected by Pay It Forward; Leder aspires to get you to laugh, cry and experience a wide variety of emotional reactions. The bad news, as I'm sure you can surmise already, is that Leder does not have the moral intelligence to use these emotional effects fruitfully. Like Brett Ratner, she is a four-year-old with a shotgun. She has a great deal of power in her hands, but she doesn't know how to direct it. Whereas Deep Impact was an offensively stupid pedestrian piece of work, Pay it Forward is an offensively stupid kinetic piece of work. This is progress, but it's not progressive enough. While it seems that this is a departure from Mimi Leder's dryly oppressive monotony, in all the ways that really count this is really just the same old shit.

One of things that I really dislike about Pay It Forward is its happy shiny cleanliness. The film's thesis is that the world is filled with many terrible things - child abuse, pedophiles, Mexicans, the sex industry, alcoholism, gambling, homelessness - but we can improve the world if we just take the time to help one another. Setting aside for the moment that said thesis is simple-minded but preachy, setting the stage for an eye-clawingly obnoxious picture, it's the film's utopian aesthetic that I find particularly troublesome. In Pay it Forward, homeless heroin addicts look like Jim Caviezel and alcoholic wife beaters look like Jon Bon Jovi.

In the film's worst scene, Bon Jovi, who plays Trevor's (Haley Joel Osment) abusive recovering alcoholic father Ricky, comes home after several years away and settles into his old routine as indicated by a simple wardrobe change. He goes from flannel to, well, a wifebeater. Ricky refuses to get a job because the family doesn't have a car. Instead he starts drinking again and starts yelling at poor Trevor to stop playing the music so loud. When Mom Arlene (Helen Hunt) protests, he snarls, "Aw, I liked you better when you had a few drinks in you." I'm hardly exaggerating. The filmmakers come off as awfully sheltered from the harsh realities that they purport to be showing us. Any teenager who has ever worked a job for minimum wage is more likely to have a realistic view of poverty than the people who have made this movie.

Leder and company deny us a real rat eye's view of America's underclass because, I'm guessing, they don't want the horror of it to outweigh the positive message. Or perhaps they believe that the simple depiction of immoral behavior instantly glamorizes it (the philosophy, it seems, of my home state's CleanFlix enterprise). They think that we don't need to see young Kevin Spacey being burned alive, because the simple suggestion of it is enough to make the point (as if Pay It Forward is a film of ideas). Whether the film's squeamishness is attributable to a misguided morality on behalf of the filmmakers, a pandering to the misguided morality of its core audience, or simply a desire to keep things on a strictly Chicken Soup for the Soul-level of sophistication, it's PG-13 rating effectively derails any attempt toward artistic integrity. It's a lot easier to think the best of mankind when you haven't been exposed to the very worst of it, and it's a lot harder to love poor people when they are also ugly, dumb, angry and altogether ignoble.

I believe that there is a gap of communication and empathy between the classes that cannot be bridged. We have no common ground as human beings, at least none that matters, and are instead trapped by the exclusiveness of our cultural groups. The homeless and the impoverished may as well be Martians for all that we can understand, relate and ultimately sympathize with them. I know that I have related similar sentiments in my review of Battle for Endor, but nonetheless I felt that I really had to push myself to write that. I can't help but think that it's very easy to equate cynicism with truthfulness, as there is a built-in defense against detractors: they are Pollyannic pussies.

I worry that this cynical outlook may be overly simplistic, that I have to let the idea simmer some more before setting it down in writing. But whatever it is, I find this resignation to the empathy gap, as seen in the sheer nihilism of Kalifornia or Deliverance or even more brilliantly in the anthropological neutrality of Harmony Korine's Gummo, or as the grounding for the movement toward a personal, spiritual morality in Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, to be far more resonant than anything that I see in Pay It Forward. The cleanliness of Pay It Forward makes me feel as if they are making allowances to better support their utopian vision. This is compassion made easy.

While there are plenty of villains in Pay It Forward, they are conveniently marginalized and/or pushed offscreen altogether. The homeless guy kicking heroin, the working single mother kicking booze, the college-educated social studies teacher letting go of his past and learning to love; all these people rather literally are paralyzed by fear and must conquer their fear to break free from their destructive course. (One imagines the Patrick Swayzee self-help guru from Donnie Darko showing the picture in one of his seminars.) This stretch of psychobabble offends for its naive simplicity, but this naive simplicity is symptomatic of a bigger naivety: the film's contention (through its choice in casting especially) that we are all - rich, poor, and everything in between - stuck in the same sinking boat. In other words, it doesn't matter if Pay It Forward doesn't offer the right solution when it has failed entirely in diagnosing the problem.

The gap between the races is both more obvious and less acknowledged by mainstream society. In the original Catherine Ryan Hyde novel, the Kevin Spacey character Eugene (Trevor's social studies teacher and Arlene's new boyfriend) was black and racial harmony was apparently one of its major themes. According to the Internet Movie Database, Denzel Washington was originally considered for the part, an actor who, ironically enough, has stated that he won't perform love scenes with white actresses.

The only black character that has been left in the film is the foul-mouthed, trigger-happy gangbanger Sidney, played by David Ramsey. Sidney is rescued from the police by a homeless woman and is told to "pay it forward." He does so by firing a gun into the ground at a crowded hospital, intimidating the staff into treating an asthmatic teenage girl before they get to his stab wound. There is a barely concealed self-knowledge to Ramsey's performance; he seems to understand that he is playing a black stereotype and he feels superior to the character. I sort of pictured him reverting to a British accent in between takes like Robert Townsend in Hollywood Shuffle. As an actor Ramsey strikes me as educated and middle-class; he doesn't really sell "street thug."

This gap between actor and character does not serve to expose the superficiality of the filmmakers' racist assumptions; rather, it helps to neutralize the threat of them. Ramsey's blackness is seen as cute and rather convenient, even. Because he's a black criminal, he has license to do all the things that the respectable white honkies only wish they could do, like, you know, firing a gun into the floor and demanding to get hospital treatment. Ramsey's performance helps to soften the character and make him palatable to a white audience.

In a funny way, this softness helps to support the film's false claims toward racial acceptance and tolerance. Despite the fact that Sidney exists only within an Anglocentric context, his presence allows the filmmakers to argue that the "pay it forward" movement has crossed color lines. The problem isn't that Pay It Forward is racist, it's that it's racist in the wrong way.

If Pay It Forward could purport to having one major selling point, it's in it's dedication to providing the audience with some sort of moral message. Unfortunately, even when the film is taken on its own terms it is neither intelligent enough nor courageous enough to survive even casual scrutiny. Essentially when somebody does a favor for you, you pay the favor forward the three other people. Fine, but not every favor necessarily enriches the world. Stopping a woman from committing suicide? Great. Giving a homeless guy a few days of food and shelter so he can get back on his feet? That's good also. Forgiving your alcoholic mother? Not sure if that is particularly selfless, but fine. Giving a reporter a brand new car after his has been destroyed? Well, it's just a material object, I would think these things don't matter in the grand scheme of things, but sure. Getting your social studies teacher laid? Um.. OK... Defending your asthmatic (again?) friend from some bullies by assaulting them on your bike? Highly questionable. Firing a gun in a crowded hospital and demanding treatment for an asthmatic teenager? Highly highly questionable. Hiding a television thief from the cops? Unjustifiable. Getting said television thief an early parole by blackmailing the governor? Even more unjustifiable.

Of course, in making these kneejerk moral judgments I'm simply reiterating mainstream social orthodoxy. You know: don't break or bend the law for your own means, give selflessly, and force and intimidation may technically work to solve problems, but they won't for very long. While I'm not sure I'll go on the record and say that this is the one absolute provably true code of ethics, it's at least a good sturdy start. Pay It Forward does not divorce itself from this social orthodoxy in a remotely fruitful way. The film never really solidly defines its sense of right or wrong actions and as thus, never protects the "pay it forward" movement from hypersubjective interpretation. Watching the film recently, it's hard not to imagine George W. Bush surveying a war-torn Iraq, flashing a thumbs-up to the country's citizens and beaming, "Don't thank me, just pay it forward." Upon getting his new car, Jay Mohr shouts out, "What do you want me to do, kill your wife?" (As the cargiver is played by Mimi Leder's husband, there is a temptation to yell out to the screen, "Hell yes!") But hey, why not? If Bruno Anthony from Strangers on a Train had been around when "pay it forward" was around, wouldn't he just advise Guy Haines to take care of three other undesirable females in exchange for his wife's death? In light of the hospital scene in Pay It Forward, there is clearly nothing to prevent him from doing so.

The film's treatment of Ricky gives me pause. We have learned to demonize the alcoholic wife beater while acknowledging that social and cultural factors beyond his control contributed to both his alcoholism and abusiveness. Arlene takes him back after seeing that he has sobered up, thinking that he has changed and deserves a second chance, and we are made to think that she is exhibiting battered wife syndrome. Eugene chastises her for putting her son in that situation and relates the story about how his father burned him alive. He believes, correctly it turns out, that guys like Ricky never change. They are incapable of it. Pay It Forward is, among other things, anti-forgiveness and even anti-humanist. It considers Ricky to be ultimately beyond the pale; he falls beyond the parameters of the "pay if forward" movement and is more of an external force of nature than a human being. The film doesn't understand where he is coming from and it doesn't particularly care to understand. The film doesn't understand nor does it wish to understand the pedophile at the train station that tries to recruit Trevor when he tries to run away from home. The film doesn't understand nor does it wish to understand the bullies that torment Trevor's asthmatic friend. It doesn't seem to want to deal with them outside of their limited role as antagonists to our heroes.

Dramatically, Pay It Forward doesn't really work. Haley Joel Osment is a huge problem. A huge huge huge problem. Unlike somebody like M. Night Shyamalan or Steven Spielberg, Mimi Leder is neither smart enough nor savvy enough to properly deal with Osment's intimidating gravitas. Trevor doesn't see ghosts and he's not a kid robot, and once these two options are taken off the table, both Leder and Osment are left wondering what to do with the character. At the end of the film they have him martyred during an attempt to "pay it forward" with a little vigilante justice. The film's last shot has people "touched" by "pay it forward," lining up to his house with candles in hand. Trevor has become a Christ figure through death and "pay it forward" is the New Law. This is the part that Osment was born to play.

However, Leder and Osment want it both ways, or perhaps they are just cowardly, and they put in a number of scenes that vainly try and convince us that Trevor is just a kid. He plays with action figures and gets hyper when he watches wrestling, bodyslamming his bean bag chair. There is an insulting scene where Trevor sets up his teacher and his mother, and Leder gives us shots where Osment scurries through the background and peeks around corners at his handiwork. I'm glad that I didn't see this in theaters; surrounded by the laughter of the easily manipulated douchebags falling for this nonsense, there is no telling what I might have done.

In other scenes, I'm not sure what is going on. While getting Arlene ready for her date with Eugene, Trevor tells her that she has to be on time because, as indicated in his speech on the first day of class, Eugene will think that she doesn't respect him if she's late. This is advice from a kid's point of view; it hasn't occurred to him that Eugene would treat punctuality from his students differently than punctuality from his fellow adults. Is the advice supposed to be adorably precocious or is it supposed to be taken seriously? Both Arlene and Leder appear to take it seriously. Leder crosscuts Eugene looking at his watch in order to keep us in suspense and when Arlene finally meets up with him her first words are an exasperated "I respect you!"

In preparing Arlene for the date, young Trevor circles around her, applying deodorant under her arms as she changes. Some critics found this a tad creepy, but for me the creepier scene is when Trevor breaks out in cheer when he sees his teacher leaving his Mom's bedroom the subsequent morning. The openness of sexuality between a single mother and her son can, of course, be explored sensitively and intelligently when taken seriously in a film. Pay It Forward is not that sort of film; this openness of sexuality between mother and son is completely uncommented upon and weightless. I don't think that the filmmakers are warped, but I do think that they are incapable of seeing the 11- or 12-year-old Osment as being even remotely sexualized.

While we're on the subject of sex, Arlene's first appearance in the film is as a cocktail waitress at a modestly upscale strip club. This is her second job; she also works as a change girl at a rather less upscale casino. A table full of businessmen pulls out a twenty-dollar-bill for a tip and lifts it out of her reach so she has to sit on his lap in order to get it. After this degradation, Leder holds on her face as she walks away so we can see her smiles and laughter dissolve to sternly sour frown. I was feeling pummeled at the time, but Leder then develops the character into a wanton slut searching for love and validation in all the wrong places. A scene where she undresses and presumably deflowers Eugene, gently accepting his scarred body and loving him for it, mirrors similar material in Mike Figgis' Leaving Las Vegas and of course pales in comparison to it. Elizabeth Shue's Sera so loved Nicolas Cage's Ben that she willingly perpetuated her whoredom in order to keep him. She believed that she had nothing else to offer him, and she was probably right.

Pay It Forward never attempts anything so complex. The film's PG-13 rating, again, necessitates that we see Arlene disrobed only down to her shoulders, keeping her from ever really sacrificing anything for him. The film doesn't think to ask what he sees in her or what she sees in him, and despite Arlene's sponsor's (standard but excellent) advice that she can't date for a year, the film is incapable of seeing their relationship as anything less but an absolute good. Otherwise, I guess, we would veer into complicated and potentially ugly real life.

This has been a sort of strange review so far, but if nothing else I think that it goes to illustrate that I'm sort of a healthy blend of the cynical and the idealistic politically, philosophically and spiritually. I do not refute Pay It Forward because of its hopefulness or even because of its cheesiness, but rather because it is complete and utter bullshit through and through. I don't know what else to say; this is not a smart movie and it's not even a particularly uplifting or life-affirming movie. They haven't developed it enough to reinforce any uplifiting or life-affirming values. I would think that arguing that Pay It Forward sucks would be like arguing that water is wet (I mean everybody already knows, right?), but a quick glance at the Internet Movie Database seems to indicate that there are plenty of people who have really bought into this film and seem to actively celebrate it. Writing a negative review of it isn't quite slaughtering a sacred cow, but it is not entirely unneeded all the same.

Still, this is the sort of film that is almost bad (by which I primarily mean hilariously overwrought) enough to inspire a cult of derisive camp aficionados. Given his comments about Patch Adams on the audio commentary track for Cecil B. Demented I have to say that I would be curious as to know what John Waters has to say about it. (Pay it Forward is incomparably more enjoyable than Patch Adams.) Still, I can't say that I'm prepared to join them; the film's form is too close to a spiritual fable and gritty social commentary, and embracing it would indicate that I am either a moron or a nihilist. To laugh at and dismiss Pay It Forward would implicitly necessitate laughing at and dismissing any serious exploration of this same material.

While I would not recommend Pay It Forward for the reasons explained above, I must admit that there are two rather minor elements that it gets spot on. The first is its perspective toward Las Vegas. Superficially, it seems that the filmmakers are setting up an easy target by equating Vegas with a modern day Sodom. As the film progresses however, it comes off as a modern day Lumberton; urban alienation and suburban alienation exist side by side. A rather frequent visitor growing up, that feels real accurate to me. Some details, like Jon Bon Jovi's cowboy biker swagger or Arlene incredulously greeting Eugene's visit to her casino with "Coming to shoot a few crap games?" actually resonate with an honest authenticity (?!). We quickly realize that every other film set in Las Vegas that we have ever seen is told through the perspective of the tourists. This may be the first Vegas film to be told through the perspective of the residents.

Of course, the film doesn't really exploit its dualism of alienation like Blue Velvet did; it uses it as a launching ground for its pop sociology lesson. The suburbia imagery hooks us in, and then it is able to argue that we are all detached from one another and need "pay it forward" to save us, and being set in Las Vegas helps to give legitimacy to its soft unreality.

The second thing about impressed me about Pay It Forward is Jim Caviezel. I think that the jury may still be out on him. His two biggest things were upstaged by his directors. The Thin Red Line was one beautiful rambling mess of a movie and while he played the film's lead, the incoherent Terrence Malick was never able to provide a character for him. He worked marvelously for what the film required of him, but unfortunately it did not require anything of him aside from his deep blue eyes and rugged beard stubble. Critics hated The Passion of the Christ and Hollywood was accordingly terrified of it. Many of the film's bad reviews found room to praise his Jesus, saying that they could detect that he could play a human Christ in a different movie, and it's unfortunate that Gibson was only interested in the character as a divine punching bag. I was fascinated at how unrecognizable he was in the film, and how he managed to give us a masculine (particularly Jewish) Christ so appreciatively different from previous screen incarnations. In Pay It Forward, Cavizel gives us more than the film deserves, effectively upstaging the performances by Academy Award-sanctioned leads. Caviezel redefines artistic conviction; he makes Osment, Hunt and Spacey look like children in comparison.

Caviezel gives the film its one and only genuine laugh. After describing "pay it forward" to Arlene, she asks him if her son said this stuff to him. He responds in a shyly stoned way, "We have our conversations." Caviezel gives the film its one and only genuinely haunting moment when he falls off the wagon and begins using drugs again, shortly after he has secured an interview as a mechanic. As Trevor calls out his name, trying to see him, we get a brief shot of him cradling himself in the falling light staring out into space. And there it is, there is the exact thing that is utterly lacking elsewhere in Pay It Forward: he's impenetrable and beyond understanding. He suggests that there really is something that he gets out of heroin, something that he is willing to throw his life away for, but we can't get it. It's out of our reach.

Caviezel also gives the film its one and only genuinely tear-jerking moment. He stops a woman from jumping off a bridge by asking her to save his life. That description by itself sounds dreadfully corny, but I think that it works so well because it's Jim Caviezel in a movie full of mere peons. The suicidal tells him that he won't understand and he says, rather ineloquently, that he hasn't just come back from the Ritz. Whatever her problems, he's seen rock bottom and she hasn't, and his mere presence makes whatever she is going through needless and self-absorbed. He puts social displacement into a broad spiritual context, and that more than anything seems to keep her from jumping. I mean right there, you begin to understand the real value of life, and the scene works.

Sometimes I'm asked why I would suffer through movies that I know are going to suck. Well, I now have my answer. Jim Caviezel in Pay It Forward. He's surrounded by shit, but there doesn't seem to have been any other place where his brilliant performance could have worked.