The Wilt Factor

It is sensationally good for the first forty-five minutes or so — so good, in fact, that you begin to think you might be in the presence of a classic piece of high Hollywood sentiment. And then, slowly but inexorably, it gets more conventional, more obvious, more manipulative, and more unconvincing. And as Pay It Forward wilts, writer Leslie Dixon and director Mimi Leder become desperate, finally attempting to pick you up like a dishtowel, forcibly wring a few last tears out of you, and hang you up to dry as the credits roll. A film that began so wonderfully concludes hatefully and falsely, with a cruel and unnecessary plot twist and a final image stolen in part from a Coca-Cola commercial.

The structure of Pay It Forward is ingenious. In the opening sequence, a cynical reporter on his uppers in Los Angeles (played by Jay Mohr) has his car destroyed at a crime scene. As he circles the car in despair, a total stranger comes out of a house and tosses him the keys to a new Jaguar. “I’ve had good luck lately,” the stranger says and promises to be in touch. the action then shifts to Las Vegas four months earlier, where a boy named Trevor (Haley Joel Osment, who came to stardom in The Sixth Sense) is mired in a hardscrabble and lonely existence in the glitz-free part of town, the son of an absent father and an alcoholic cocktail waitress named Arlene (Helen Hunt).

Trevor is inspired by a challenge from his social-studies teacher, Mr. Simonet (Kevin Spacey), to come up with an idea that will make a difference. Rather than paying someone back for a difficult favor, Trevor determines, the principle should be to “pay it forward” — to do three favors for others, who in turn will be obliged to do three favors each, and so on.

The favors have to be difficult and costly ones, because such services will confer a sense of obligation sufficient to keep the “pay it forward” principle going. Trevor starts off by using his savings to help a junkie land a job at a local motel — and then decides to help both his mother and Mr. Simonet by pairing them off. The movie moves on parallel time tracks as that romance takes hold and the reporter with the Jaguar traces the source of his gift from Los Angeles to Las Vegas through the experiences of those who found themselves the unlikely beneficiaries of Trevor’s idea.

Like all the great movie fables that inspired it, Pay It Forward is suffused with melancholy. Its characters are wounded, isolated, and busy harboring their grievances. Mr. Simonet, whose face is marked with burn scars, turns suddenly nasty when Trevor asks him what happened (because he assumes the other kids in school have put the boy up to it). Arlene, who has promised Trevor she will stop drinking, has bottles, hidden in the washing machine and in the kitchen ceiling, to which she resorts at times of stress.

The movie’s portrait of lower-depths Las Vegas is especially remarkable, as its characters go about their business on the fringes of this adult playground. Trevor rides his bike alongside a city dump without even looking at the Strip glistening like the Emerald City a mile to the east. To get decent tips, Arlene flirts with customers in the bar where she works, then drops her smile like a piece of rotted meat when she turns away. Late at night, Mr. Simonet irons his shirt for the next school day as the million casino lights twinkle ironically through the window.

All three actors’ performances are extraordinary. Spacey captures perfectly the over-precise but gently humorous pedantry of a dedicated junior-high-school teacher and the terror this very controlled man feels when his neurotically orderly world is invaded by the needy and sloppy Arlene. Hunt is a particular revelation, scrounging around desperately for her bottles, visibly weighed down by the disappointment and disgust of her son.

And as for Osment — who is this kid? Last year he gave the greatest performance ever delivered onscreen by a child in The Sixth Sense, and now he turns around and offers another indelible characterization of a brilliant and complex boy.

There’s a moment toward the end of the film when the reporter finally catches up with Trevor and puts him on camera for a news report, and Osment, who has hardly cracked a smile in the preceding two hours, shows how delighted Trevor is by the attention with a gigantic and sweet grin, his legs swinging excitedly as he sits perched on a stool in the middle of Mr. Simonet’s classroom. His is some kind of freak genius akin to the musicianship of a violin prodigy, and one can only hope that Osment doesn’t flame out from the pressure as so many prodigies do.

Alas, the brilliant setup and performances in Pay It Forward cannot make up for the wilting that occurs when the plot kicks into high gear. A terrific movie turns into a second-rank feature for television, as Trevor’s indifferent father returns to the scene, Mr. Simonet reveals the ridiculously unconvincing cause of his scars, and the movie’s creative team does its best — or rather, its worst — to guarantee that Osment is not unfairly denied a Best Supporting Actor Oscar at next year’s ceremony as he was at this year’s.

It’s like finding wilted lettuce at the bottom of a salad that tasted so good when you began eating it.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.