Pay It Forward
by Mimi Leder
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Haley Joel Osment, Helen Hunt, Jay Mohr, Jim Caviezel, Kevin SpaceyDirector: Mimi Leder
Producer: Jonathan Treisman
Producer: Mary McLaglen
Producer: Paddy Carson
Producer: Peter Abrams
Producer: Robert L. Levy
Writer: Catherine Ryan Hyde
Writer: Leslie Dixon
DVD: Region Code 2
Audio: English (Subtitled); Arabic (Subtitled); Romanian (Subtitled); Bulgarian (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: PAL
Picture Format: 1.77:1
Running Time: 123 minutes
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Summary of Pay It Forward
Pay It Forward is a multi-level marketing scheme of the heart. Beginning as a seventh-grade class assignment to put into action an idea that could change the world, young Trevor McKinney (Haley Joel Osment) comes up with a plan to do good deeds for three people who then by way of payment each must do good turns for three other people. These nine people also must pay it forward and so on, ad infinitum. If successful, the resulting network of do-gooders ought to comprise the entire world. Trevor's attempts to get the ball rolling include befriending a junkie (James Caviezel) and trying to set up his recovering-alcoholic mother (Helen Hunt) with his burn-victim teacher (Kevin Spacey), who posed the assignment.While this could have turned into unmitigated schmaltz, the acting elevates this film to mitigated schmaltz. By turns powerful and measured, the performances of Spacey, Hunt, and Osment can't make up for the many missteps in a screenplay that sanitizes the look of the lower-middle class and expects us to believe that homeless alcoholics and junkies speak in the elevated manner of grad students. (Can that really be Angie Dickinson as Hunt's dispossessed mother? Yes, it is!) The germ of the story is a good one, though, and one may wonder how it would have been handled by the likes of Frank Capra, who could balance sentiment with humor. But clearly Capra would never have let the ending of his version to take the nosedive into cliché and pathos that director Mimi Leder has allowed in this film. More than a few viewers will also recognize that Leder has blatantly borrowed her final image from Field of Dreams, where its intended effect was more keenly and honestly felt. --Jim Gay
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