Pay it Forward is not a film for everyone. It is a film that believes in altruism, or a selfless concern for the well-being of others. Haley Joel Osment, the talented young actor from The Sixth Sense plays Trevor, a schoolboy whose attempts to help other people profoundly change many lives including, not surprisingly, his own. It all starts when his new teacher, Mr. Simonet, played by Kevin Spacey, gives the class an assignment — Think of an idea that could change the world, and put it into action.
Unlike the rest of his classmates, Trevor takes the assignment so literally that he invents an idea called "paying it forward", in which he tries the help three people. In return, instead of paying him back, each person is required to help three other people — to pay it forward. The first thing he does is to invite a tramp to stay in the garage. This doesn’t exactly work out how he was hoping, and although he has no idea how much good it really has done, he abandons that idea, and turns his attention to Mr. Simonet. He tries to get the teacher together with his mother, a recovering alcoholic whose attempts at recovery are failing. This leads to certain complications. Things get even more complicated when Trevor’s father decides to turn up on the doorstep.
The film follows events in the lives of the various people who Trevor has somehow touched through his pay it forward scheme, and sometimes the order of the events is not obvious, but on later reflection everything can be put into focus and it all makes sense somehow.
Spacey’s performance is brilliant as a man who is terrified to get close. He has a badly scarred face, and we sense that he is just afraid of rejection, but maybe there’s more to it than that. Helen Hunt’s performance as Trevor’s long-suffering mother is also one of her finest, and of course, Osment’s own performance is quite astonishing.
In fact, the strength of the acting is what makes Pay it Forward so good. The problem I think many people will have with it will be to do with the feel-good-do-good nature of the story. Some will say it’s unrealistic, that the world just doesn’t work that way. Maybe not, but it could. All it takes is for people to change their minds about what is important, and to believe that people are genuinely good, and that by helping others you’re really helping yourself. This is not something it’s easy to believe these days, and therefore Pay it Forward is not a film it’s easy to like. But I like it immensely, and I highly recommend it.