One of the most confusing films- Helen Hunt was terrible!
Pay it Forward (2000) came out when Helen Hunt was fresh off her 1998 Oscar win for Best Actress in As Good As It Gets (1997). Because of this, producers leapt at a chance to cast her in four (4) count em, big budget movies in 2000: Cast Away with Tom Hanks, Dr. T & the Women with Richard Gere, What Women Want with Mel Gibson, and this one with Kevin Spacey. Of course, this was a failure. Helen Hunt proved she couldst be a hot romantic leading lady despite strong acting chops, and an Oscar nomination twelve years later in The Sessions.
Pay it Forward is a strange little movie starring another has been, Haley Joel Osment. Fresh off his Oscar nod from The Sixth Sense, he plays another annoying sensitive boy struggling in school and has a social studies teacher (Spacey) who has so many burn marks on his face he seems stripped from an X-Men movie. The title refers to a movement the kid causes by doing good deeds for three other people in your life. Flashbacks show us scenes like a Dr giving a reporter his new Mercedes. A thug letting a girl in the ER go before him. And Helen Hunt, a trashy cocktail waitress, allowing for a drug addict homeless man to fix her truck.
The plot makes no sense because we don't quite know what chronological order is happening. The movie focuses so little on the impact of Trevor's teacher and more on Helen Hunt and Spacey's sleezy relationship. Hunt, by the way, speaks in a accent so obtrusively vile it's like fingernails on the chalkboard weren't enough. Her education seems to not go past sixth grade. She shares a lot in common with Meryl Streep's character in Music of the Heart (1999); both are brassy, unlikable women who don't handle men well and have kids they can't raise well either.
The tragedy of the movie falls in Osment's character. Without revealing too much, its clear he's doomed from the start and the ending is so hard to watch because the movie doesn't let up any air for build up. This is a raw, heartless ride and Thomas Newman's score sounds like Erin Brockovich made twins. There are no winners. No likable characters. Spacey speaks in big vocabulary words and pisses everyone off by coming off pompous and also nerdy. We don't get why he has burns and he won't tell us either.
The reporter who gets the nice car is annoying too. Everyone seems to be truing to get credit for paying if forward, but again- their timelines are not coordinating well with the story on screen. And Angie Dickinson also shows up in a thankless role of some bum driving a car she also lives in.
FINAL GRADE: D