Bale’s ‘Psycho’ Analysis

Christian Bale was driving through the streets of Los Angeles in the wee hours of the morning recently when he saw a small car hit a large German shepherd. The dog went flying through the air, crashed to the ground, then was hit by a couple more cars as it tried to regain its footing. All the drivers involved kept going. Bale pulled over and sat by the side of the road, stroking the creature as it drew its last breaths.

This tender streak for animals stirred during the actor’s childhood in Oxfordshire, England, when he read “Charlotte’s Web” at age 8, sat down to dinner that night and flatly refused a plate of pork chops. The rest of the family followed suit, and meat was exiled from the Bale household.

That youthful determination has translated into an adult bent for animal activism that embraces, among others, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and the Doris Day Animal League. His supporters, who rally at https://www.christianbale.org, raised money to adopt a gorilla in Rwanda.

Compare this, now, with Patrick Bateman, the desensitized corporate executive he plays in “American Psycho,” who kills people as perfunctorily (and messily) as one might swat a mosquito. Bateman springs to robotic life from the pages of Bret Easton Ellis’ incendiary 1992 novel, owing in great part to Bale’s go-for-broke, stylized performance. But the new film by director Mary Harron (“I Shot Andy Warhol”) also tempers the violence and magnifies the satire, making Bateman an exaggerated embodiment of the culture of ‘80s greed.

‘Psycho’ Role Called for Personal Changes

As the cosmetically obsessed Bateman, Bale assumes a crisp American accent and immaculate designer clothing. He also inhabits a new, buffed-to-the-max body, the result of two months of intensive personal training. Gone is the pointy, gapped smile that warms “Little Women,” “Portrait of a Lady” and his extraordinary debut at age 12 as the star of “Empire of the Sun.” In its place, a gleaming, straight-rule set of teeth, the product of two weeks of retainers and splitting headaches.

“Mary described Bateman to me as an alien who has landed on Earth and is trying to understand humans and assimilate with them,” he says from a window seat at Brooklyn’s River Cafe, glancing out over the high-finance, downtown Manhattan locus of his new film, which opens Friday. (It is one of several tony watering holes name-dropped by Bateman and his platinum-card colleagues.) “Like someone who recognizes, well, humans appear to experience joy and feel some emotion from this thing called music. So he picks the biggest mainstream music he can find and chooses to identify with that.

“And in the same way he knows exactly what it is he is meant to say, meant to feel, because there are no real limits to him. He has no conscience or guilt. He could easily get up and maim somebody for life or give him a compliment.

“Because there is no heart to any of his decisions, there really is no absolutely genuine moment with Bateman. It’s horrific, but it’s still ridiculous at the same time. He isn’t a Hannibal Lecter kind of villain, just because you can’t help but laugh at him so much. A lot of people felt I would be hypnotized by this evil character. But he was an easy character to just turn off, precisely because we went through this stylization. I slept very well every night.”

As if on cue, a waiter deposits a dessert in front of Bale that could be a prop in one of the movie’s ultra-chic locales: a meticulously wrought berry pastry with red spears shooting out from a dollop of whipped cream. Painted on the plate is a G-clef swirl of fruit glaze, punctuated to the side with blood-red drops of raspberry sauce. “This is very ‘American Psycho,’ isn’t it?” he exclaims, grinning.

In one of those absurd rolls of the dice that could happen only in show business, Bale followed his portrait of Patrick Bateman by playing Jesus Christ a few weeks later. The occasion was “Mary, Mother of Jesus,” an unintentionally ludicrous dramatization of the gospels bankrolled by Eunice Shriver Kennedy and Bobby Shriver (it aired on NBC in November). To Bale’s enduring credit, he came off with dignity intact.

Bale defends taking the impossible role: “So many naysayers about ‘American Psycho’ were saying, ‘OK, Christian, if you must do Bateman, you’ve got to do a romantic comedy or play somebody good immediately afterward, if possible.’ Play somebody good? And suddenly Jesus Christ landed in my plate? I thought, I can’t resist.”

Despite the implied piety of his given name, the young Christian received mixed messages concerning spirituality from his father, a commercial pilot. “I always equated Jesus with Neil Diamond. My dad has always despised organized religion on the one hand but been fascinated by it at the same time. We’d go to all sorts of different churches, talk to different people. We’d come back for Sunday lunch and he’d stick on a Neil Diamond album. So always in my head there was Neil Diamond in a white flowing tunic with a big beard, talking to the masses.”

A Family Steeped in Activism and Acting

Bale inherits his legacy of activism from his father, who would also take him to Save the Whale and Greenpeace rallies. The drive to perform came from both sides of the family: His mother was a dancer, her father was a stand-up comic and magician, his father’s uncle acted in film. Dangling from some limb of the family tree is someone who was a cousin of Lily Langtry, the iconic Victorian performer.

After three years of commercial work, a 12-year-old Bale nabbed the pivotal role in “Empire of the Sun,” Steven Spielberg’s epic telling of a cosseted English boy in Shanghai who is separated from his parents in wartime and forced to survive on his own. Though the film opened to mixed notices, Bale’s feverish performance (overlooked during last month’s Oscar tribute to child actors) received unanimous acclaim.

The first-time movie star was on screen virtually every minute of the film’s 2 1/2 hours, the magnetic center of scenes often involving thousands of extras. “I didn’t know till I watched ‘The Making of Empire of the Sun’ that I had screwed up this huge scene on the roof with all the airplanes and explosions. The whole thing had to be re-rigged because I blocked it all from the camera. Spielberg must have been furious. But I never knew about it. That’s really quite phenomenal.

“Part of why children can give good performances is because of the complete ignorance of the pressure on them. There was no way I was thinking this could be a career maker or breaker.”

But Bale would succumb to the pressure of the inevitable media circus. “It had a massive effect on my life. I don’t know how you manage to not feel like a freak from all this sudden attention. I just went from a loudmouth teenager getting in trouble, trying to get attention, to suddenly having it all the time. So I tried to be as invisible as possible. I went to my dad and said, I don’t want to do this, it’s not fun anymore.

“I wince a bit at Haley Joel Osment--the 11-year-old Oscar nominee for ‘The Sixth Sense.’ Being a good actor doesn’t correlate to being mature. Suddenly, because I was in a movie, I was meant to know better.’ ”

Unlike many child stars, Bale rebounded triumphantly. He explains his longevity partly by “Empire’s” tepid (for Spielberg) box office and his debut character, Jim, who challenged audience’s sympathies. “Had it been bigger, maybe I would have ended up in those teen movies. And I was spoiled by starting early on with an adult, complex role, so that was what I continued to aim for. Because I was never relying upon being a cute pre-pubescent, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t anymore.”

Managing to Survive Child-Acting Pressures

Almost instinctively, the child Bale rescued himself from the great expectations of grown-up society. In poignant contrast, his “Sun” character Jim and then Patrick Bateman, 14 years later, would go postal from the weight of such pressures. “I did a little research on serial killers for ‘American Psycho,’ and I discovered that every single one had been unnecessarily cruel to animals in their childhood.”

Bale pauses as he recalls the cars that sped by the dying German shepherd. “It’s a balance. You have to toughen yourself up to some degree in order to get anything done. But not to this extent where people are just saying, ‘I don’t care anymore.’ I think it just comes down to a matter of respect for life in any form, no matter what it is.”