All of Bret Easton Ellis’ early novels were made into movies. Mary Harron’s American Psycho is the most famous adaptation. Marek Kanievska’s Less Than Zero may be, though deeply flawed, the most authentic, because there really is no substitute for the actual glossy emptiness of the 1980s. But Roger Avary’s 2002 opus The Rules of Attraction is by far the most faithful. It’s a movie about overprivileged and dissolute college students, but, more deeply, about destiny and love and communication. It’s not necessarily faithful to the 1987 novel in the sense of the exact translation of written word into onscreen action – though a remarkable amount of Ellis’ dialogue/monologue remains intact – but its combination of cool cynicism and bittersweet empathy recognizably strikes the same tone as the book.
But if The Rules of Attraction is mostly Bret Easton Ellis in tone, it also feels as though Avery is reclaiming the style that had become thought of, via his screenplays, as Quentin Tarantino’s. But whereas the tricksy, kinetic structure of Pulp Fiction feels flashy and designed to impress, a similar basic idea – beginning at the end and then seeing how we got there – gives The Rules of Attraction an unexpected, almost undeserved, emotional depth. Undeserved, because on the surface, the behavior of even the movie’s more sensitive characters is immature and shallow; that is to say, the movie reflects accurately the lives of students through the ages.
Ellis’ novel, told in the first-person from multiple viewpoints, is not especially long, but the movie streamlines and tightens its loose plot and narrows down its cast of characters. At the same time, it preserves Ellis’ tone by retaining the main characters’ different perspectives via voiceovers of their inner monologues. The sort-of-but-not-quite love triangle at the center of the film consists of three students who have in common messy love lives and a lack of direction: Lauren Hynde (Shannon Sossamon), an idealistic art student; Paul Denton (Ian Somerhalder), Hynde’s ex-boyfriend who has recently come out as gay; and Sean Bateman (James Van Der Beek), a drug dealer and the younger brother (not that it’s mentioned explicitly) of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman.
As the movie opens, we meet the characters as the semester draws to a disastrous close with the “End of the World” party. Lauren has been saving her virginity for a character we see across the room, Victor (Kip Pardue), but ends up going to a friend’s room with the next best thing, an NYC film student. But she passes out, and when she wakes, she is being raped (not that she refers to it as such) by a stranger as the student films them both. To add insult to injury, the stranger, a “townie” and not even a student, vomits on her repeatedly. Lauren’s voiceover tells us, depressingly, that “I always knew it was going to be like this.”
The film rewinds and we find that, at the same time, Paul is not faring much better. After wistfully staring at Sean Bateman across the room, he picks up a jock, who then proceeds to violently throw him out of his room when he makes a move on him. Rewinding again, we find Bateman, bruised, disheveled and drinking heavily, tearing up and throwing away a pile of love letters. Telling us he’s an “emotional vampire who feeds off of other people’s real emotions,” Bateman looks around predatorily for a girl to take to his room, which he does, but finds himself disconnecting from the situation even as they begin to have sex, as it turns out, a symptom of a wider disconnection from everything in his life.
From this unpromising beginning the movie rewinds again to the beginning of the semester and the protagonists are set on the path towards the inevitable denouement. After a beautifully John Hughes-like opening montage of student life soundtracked by the Cure’s “Six Different Ways,” the story of Lauren, Paul and Sean gets underway. As things move along, we discover that Sean and Lauren have a certain rapport that Sean essentially destroys through his insensitivity and opportunism, at the same time as he falls in love with her. We discover why Lauren doesn’t get together with Victor – who is the subject of his own especially good interlude, straight from the pages of the novel. She refers to Victor throughout the movie as her boyfriend and frets about being unfaithful to him while he’s away in Europe, but when he finally returns it turns out that he doesn’t even remember who she is. This story is mirrored, in a way even more excruciatingly, by the one-sided relationship between Paul and Sean, as the viewer can clearly see that what Paul thinks is the reciprocation of his feelings is partly a misunderstanding but mostly just fairly benign indifference from Bateman who is, above all self-absorbed and worried about his ever-growing debt to the serious drug dealer that he works for.
Bateman is coarse and cynical and reliant on drugs and alcohol to function, but an unexpected vulnerable side to his personality is revealed when we see that he has become reliant also on the anonymous love letters that arrive in his college mailbox, which he wrongly convinces himself are from Lauren. In fact, in another echo (this time of Lauren’s imaginary relationship with Victor), Sean hasn’t even noticed the nameless character who writes to him at all, and he remains oblivious even when she commits suicide, despairing of her situation when she sees him leave a party with Lauren’s roommate, which also, coincidentally, ruins his chances of a relationship with Lauren.
The story moves rapidly and Avary’s direction is imaginative and stylish, but he is aided by superb performances from his lead actors. It’s easy now to forget how well-known Van Der Beek was at the time, but in 2002, “Dawson’s Creek’ was still arguably the world’s number-one teen drama. Within the first few minutes of The Rules of Attraction, Van Der Beek manages to utterly dispel the slightly wet ghost of Dawson Leery. It’s a bravura performance, sometimes reaching almost Bruce Campbell-like levels of hysteria, but at the moments when it matters the most, it feels real and there seem to be genuine hidden depths beneath the character’s reprehensible outer shell.
Like Van Der Beek, Sossamon, who was fresh from A Knight’s Tale, was then at the peak of her fame. Her performance as Lauren Hynde is beautifully judged, vulnerable but understated in comparison with her costars. The movie’s Paul Denton is a warmer and more pleasant character than in the book and largely that’s thanks to Ian Somerhalder. Paul is the most consistently disappointed character in the story, but the most light-hearted, romantic and philosophical too, and Somerhalder plays the role with a superb mixture of vulnerability and cockiness that makes you wish he was in more good movies. The supporting cast is full of standouts too: Swoosie Kurtz as the long-suffering mother of Paul’s outrageously bratty friend; Eric Stoltz as a sleazy professor; Pardue as the spoiled hedonist Victor.
The movie’s only real jarring notes come with the encounters between Bateman and the heavy drug dealer Rupert (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and his sidekick, Guest (Michael Ralph). Neither actor gives a bad performance, it’s just that they seem to be from a different Avary movie altogether, probably Killing Zoe. Mostly, The Rules of Attraction doesn’t feel Tarantino-esque at all – in fact it seems to owe more to Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting than it does to Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction – but the scenes with Collins and Ralph, especially when the former is ranting into the camera, are almost comically post-Tarantino. In Ellis’ novel, Rupert Guest is one character, and although he is indeed a violent drug dealer, he feels like a convincingly low-key parasite who has become an integral part of privileged Camden college life. Rupert and Guest, despite the tension and dynamism of their scenes, mostly do not. Still, those scenes are pretty good in themselves and, if they feel a little contrived, they still propel the plot forcefully towards its inevitable conclusion.
That conclusion, like everything about The Rules of Attraction, is ambiguous; the film opens and closes with “The End of the World,” but it only really ends for Bateman’s unnoticed admirer. Everyone else is older and maybe wiser, if not happier by the end. And yet for all its harshness and cynicism, the film, like Ellis’ novel, feels deeply empathetic. Avary brings the viewer into the world of these spoiled, promiscuous and often amoral students and shows us that, platitudinous though it may be to say so, they are just people, kids even, with the same feelings and needs as anybody else. And because it really is that simple, the graphic scenes of sex and drug abuse and violence, the rawness of the film, are important. It’s the opposite of sweetening the pill, and Avary does it with skill and sensitivity. It’s not a nice film, but it’s an honest one, and like the novel it’s based on, it leaves behind a kind of F. Scott Fitzgerald feeling of bitter and wistful nostalgia.
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