MOO-VEE-RE-VEE-U : Pay It Forward

Pay It Forward is a movie released in 2000, directed by Mimi Leder and based on the novel of the same name written by Catherine Ryan Hyde. This movie stars Kevin Spacey, Haley Joel Osment and Helen Hunt.

Summary: The movie tells the story of Trevor Mckinney (Haley Joel Osment), an 12 years old boy, with an alcoholic mom (Helen Hunt) who received from his social studies teacher, Mr. Simonet, (Kevin Spacey) the assignment of founding an idea to change the world and to put this idea into action. Trevor thinks thus of an idea which is based on helping others, but in a more radical way: Trevor has to help three different people by trying to solve a problem that these people have, but cannot fix by themselves. Those three people will then have to help three other people in the same way as Trevor did and so on… Trevor decides thus to firstly help a homeless man by giving him some food and a shelter, but he will soon realize that his task wasn’t an easy one.

Personally, I think that this movie is a good one. The actors were great, especially Haley Joel Osment who is, I think, very talented for his young age. Helen Hunt also did a great job by playing the alcoholic mom and Kevin Spacey gave an incredible performance too with his role of calm but complexed teacher. Beside the actors, the plot was good too. The storyline was logical, smart and original and captured my attention during the whole movie. However, one thing that I liked a little bit less was the music, not because it sounded terrible, but rather because there was only one sound track. Another thing that I didn’t very like was the way the editors put the scene together. Because of all the flashbacks and the different storylines, it was a little bit hard to follow the story. The chronology was indeed quite a bit confusing.

Ultimately, I would like to say that although the fact that the storyline is confusing, Pay It Forward is still a very good movie. I would give this movie the rating of 8.5 out of 10. It is the kind of movie that makes us think about our daily acts and that gives hope about the future of humanity. I recommend it. It is definitely a movie worth seeing.

Z.X.