Pay It Forward is an extremely sinister movie masquerading as uplift, a movie that takes its viewers for idiots likely to be dumbfounded by such arcane words as 'pertinent.' It features Kevin Spacey as Eugene Simonet, a seventh grade social studies teacher who goes out of his way to use fifty cent words not because they're the best linguistic choices available to him, but because he likes nothing better than to stop in the middle of a point in order to define one of his high falutin terms for his confused auditors.

On his first day in seventh grade, Trevor McKinney (Haley Joel Osment) walks into Mr. Simonet's class to find a profoundly challenging extra credit assignment scrawled across the blackboard: "Come up with an idea to change the world, and put it into ACTION."

In an effort to prove that nice guys really do finish last, young Trevor comes up with 'Pay It Forward,' a do-gooder pyramid scheme that he attempts to initiate by doing kindnesses to three people in need of his help. Once he helps them, they are obliged not to pay him back, but to pay his kindness forward, each of them helping three others in turn.

According to what we see in the film, altruism not only ends up doing more harm than good, but turns out ultimately to be self-serving anyway. The people who are helped by Trevor's scheme fall into one of three equally objectionable categories: 1) Criminals (drug addicts/thieves) who are enabled by the assistance of 'Pay It Forward' to escape the consequences of their criminal activities; 2) Completely unbelievable characters who are obviously the figment of Trevor's imagination (a high-powered attorney in the city of Los Angeles who apparently never met a doctor in his life and sits in the emergency room of a hospital for four hours as his daughter suffocates from an asthmatic attack, a man who clearly exhibits the helplessness that we know to expect from partners in law firms); and 3) People who need to be helped not because of what the help will do for them, but because of what helping them will do for Trevor (including Mr. Simonet, whom Trevor lures into a romantic relationship with his single mother not so much to help Simonet find happiness as to ensure that Trevor's alcoholic father will be driven away upon his inevitable return).

Even more disturbing than the film's seeming indictment of kindness is its celebration of the more traditional methods that we as a society have developed for getting things done. The film starts with a reporter named Chris Chandler (Jay Mohr) receiving a Jaguar from a stranger as an instance of kindness inspired by the 'Pay It Forward' scheme. Immediately, of course, he decides to advance his own career by uncovering the story. We never see him so much as consider doing a kindness for someone in need of assistance; he is only comfortable and effective at dealing with people when things are clearly negotiated. He blackmails a governor into 'massaging' the parole date of a criminal in exchange for information from the criminal. He trades two bottles of liquor for information from a woman who gives him the crucial link to his story. Strangely, all of Chris Chandler's negotiations work. No one gets killed because of his machinations. No one gets hurt.

Apparently the thing to watch out for in this crazy world of ours is kindness. We all need to take our lessons from the reporter who has a job to do and gets it done by relying on such traditional methods as blackmail, bribery, and the other standard operating procedures of the old boy network.

To its credit, however, the movie ends happily. We discover that little boys like Trevor (whose upper lips are prone to quiver over their offensively gopher-like teeth) will always end up eliminated from the equation of life by knife-wielding bullies, the kind of bullies who will presumably go on to thrive according to the methodology exemplified by the character of Chris Chandler. As an added bonus, we get to see things work out between Mr. Simonet and Trevor's mother Arlene (Helen Hunt). It's nice to know that people who deserve one another end up together. They can look forward to years of Arlene asking Mr. Simonet whether a particular scatological term is "too trailer trash a word" for him as she puffs out her chest in a frilly white cotton blouse designed to expose her midriff. And he can respond to her in polysyllabic terminology designed to make her head spin.

As for the rest of us, I'm wondering whether the best response to a film like this does or doesn't involve cyanide in our Kool-aid.



Recommended: No