Pay it Forward
dir. Mimi Leder
Warner Bros.

Pay It Forward is a forward and obvious movie. The characters are clear-cut, the mysteries are easily distinguished, the story is formulaic and the goals are discernible. Director Mimi Leder (Deep Impact) swings Forward at you like a brand-new baseball bat, with each hit hurting a little less than the previous one.

BASH! For the first and only time in his career, Jay Mohr is a friendly and comforting face. As a Los Angeles journalist, Mohr links the narrative together by tracking the “pay it forward” movement (do a favor for a new person, rather than paying it back) after being bestowed a Jaguar from a stranger. His journey traces one branch of the ever-present line-and-circle graph to the source, the classroom of Eugene Simonet (Kevin Spacey), and demonstrates the width of the Forward plan while wannabe-enlightened seventh grader Trevor McKinney (Haley Joel Osment) and his circle of friends demonstrate its depth.

BAM! Pay it Forward is American Beauty 2, right down to Spacey’s central role and the too-similar Thomas Newman soundtrack, but it’s more user friendly. A similar attitude is borrowed, too — except this time, rather than fighting suburban angst, Forward presents a precise plan to combat desolation in the Vegas slums. Leder’s movie deals with darker issues — alcoholism, child abuse — that make marijuana use and suburban angst seem like hopscotch, but while the message of Beauty resulted in a rash of divorces across America, Forward presents a formula for kindness that will, no doubt, be posed in seventh grades across the country.

POW! This is a movie about Helen Hunt more than it is about Kevin Spacey. The rumor you hear about Spacey not clinching a Best Actor Oscar with this performance isn’t backlash. The story simply isn’t about Simonet, a schoolteacher disfigured by burns from head to foot. The ambivalence about the character may come from translation; the Simonet in Catherine Ryan Hyde’s book was black and had depth to him apart from psychological scars stemming from his physical ones. Spacey isn’t allowed to be much other than aloof. This role could have been landmark for, say, Eddie Murphy, but instead, Forward sacrifices the gains of biracial themes by plugging in Spacey, the watermark for critically hailed movies.

THUD! This is a movie about Haley Joel Osment more than it is about Helen Hunt. Hunt can certainly be all sorts of ugly, especially as Trevor’s mother. But while she gives a solid performance, she’s around just to show, in litmus-test fashion, the positive change her son’s efforts exact on her. As that son, Osment is a pillar of frustration and spirit, and every nuance that was wasted in The Sixth Sense is embraced in Forward. He tries so hard to both change his world and hide from it — hell, nary a movie-goer will leave without feeling for the kid.

PING! Pay It Forward is not a spectacular movie. It seems that a growing trend is to attack viewers' hearts through their minds. American Beauty had that quality; viewers left thinking about their lives, but not flat-out sobbing. Forward tries entirely too hard to ride the coattails of Beauty, but by nestling into the niche the earlier movie so carefully carved out, the mismatch in fit is glaring. The whole work revolves around Trevor's pay-it-forward plan, but not once does a character speculate about the altruism, or even the effect. The no-brainer changes people undergo, from Hunt's taming to Spacey's blooming, is so obvious that it seems token. Characters don't observe their journey; they just pop up when they've hit their goal. Pay It Forward will no doubt be all the rage with parents and schoolteachers for its selfless message. It is a parable for modern children, but like Biblical parables, the lesson is better remembered than the story. Pay It Forward is a movie with heart that forgot a soul.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)