Film Review: Pay It Forward (2000)

If the films are to be judged by the positivity of the messages they were trying to convey, few would rank higher than Pay It Forward, 2000 drama directed by Mimi Leder. The film is based on the eponymous novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde. Plot begins in Las Vegas where the protagonist, young boy Trevor McKinney (played by Haley Joel Osment) lives with his mother Arlene (played by Helent Hunt), who works two jobs to support them and also struggles with her own alcoholism. Trevor attend the school where on the first day of new semester his class gets new social studies teacher – Eugene Simonet (played by Kevin Spacey), man who establishes authority among rowdy students more by frightening scars on his face than particular teaching skills. When Simonet assigns class to discover ways to make the world better, Trevor takes this assignment seriously. After some thinking, he comes with a simple and effective concept called “pay it forward”. Trevor believes that anyone can do some good deed towards randomly encountered people and that each of them can do the same, thus spreading the cycle of philanthropy. The first good deed Trevor does is to bring homeless heroin addict Jerry (played by Jim Caviezel) to his family’s garage. The second target of his altruism is his mother and the third Simonet, whom he tries to set up as Arlene’s next romantic partner. Things, however, don’t work exactly as Trevor planned. In the meantime, story brings attention of Chris Chandler (played by Jay Mohr), Los Angeles newspaper reporter who experienced “pay it forward” altruism himself and decided to track the chain of good deeds to its source.

Screenwriter Leslie Dixon apparently deeply believed in the altruistic message of Pay It Forward. Yet, many critics and the audience saw that very altruistic message as nothing more than part of Oscar bait. Two main actors – Spacey and Hunt – have already won Oscars, and even young Osment was nominated for The Sixth Sense. Both Spacey and Hunt had some reasons to expect another golden statue, because their characters were physically or mentally handicapped, which happened to be favourite kind of roles for Academy voters. However, good intentions weren’t enough for good film. Mimi Leder, director who had worked for Steven Spielberg in her previous films, tried to fill Pay It Forward with typically Spielbergian combination of sentimentality and promotion of family values. However, those attempts mostly happen at the wrong points of the film, especially in the second half, when it looks more like a romantic drama than piece of socially conscious cinema. Everything falls apart with the unexpected ending that would make many viewers believe that they were subjected to cheap emotional manipulation. Spacey and Hunt show that they can act and the film has few entertaining moments (one of them starring Leder’s husband Gary Werntz as altruistic lawyer), those moments are too few and far in between to justify two hours of running time.

RATING: 4/10 (+)

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