Pay It Forward, directed by Mimi Leder, is about favors done to others rather than favors paid back. When the film begins, Eugene Simonet (played by Kevin Spacey) is in front of a seventh grade social studies class in Las Vegas on the first day of school. After explaining the rules of conduct, he gives an assignment for the term. Each student is to think of something that would make the world better AND to put the idea into practice. The most perceptive response is from Trevor McKinney (played by Haley Joel Osment), who asks him if he ever put into practice something that would make the world better. Simonet's candid response is that he gets up early, has breakfast, comes to class, and passes the buck to his students. Meanwhile, filmviewers learn about Trevor's recovering alcoholic mother Arlene (played by Helen Hunt), who holds two jobs as a cocktail waitress. Her husband Ricky (played by Jon Bon Jovi), another alcoholic, got violent one day with her, and he is now living elsewhere. Clearly, Trevor's sharp question to his teacher is because he has been exposed to adult hypocrisy for much of his life. In any case, on the day when students present their proposals in class, Trevor draws a circle representing himself, then three circles below, and three circles below each circle. What he suggests is that acts of unsolicited kindness can have a multiplier effect. In the first effort, Trevor brings home Jerry, a homeless man (played by James Caviezel), who sleeps in the garage and repairs a truck. When Arlene panics on discovering him, she gets a rifle and insists that he must leave. Later, Jerry saves a woman from suicide. But Trevor's principal act of kindness is to try to bring his teacher and his mother together so that he might have a kind, sober father and a stable nuclear family. That relationship goes through twists and turns due to the social class difference between an educated teacher and a working class woman. At one point, Ricky returns to spoil Trevor's matchmaking. Meanwhile, a lawyer gets involved in a kind deed, an African America practices "pay it forward" in a hospital and then in prison, and a news reporter publicizes the "pay it forward" movement, which has spread to Los Angeles and San Francisco. In short, Pay It Forward is a feel-good movie based on the premise that random acts of kindness, though difficult to execute, will make the world better. The film is based on the novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde. MH
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