Hitchcock - review

Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren are formidable as the iconic director and his wife in a behind-the-scenes drama that descends into romcom banality
p37 Hitchcock film main 08/02
27 February 2013

There’s no substitute for genius. Alfred Hitchcock had it aplenty. He could take schlocky material like Robert Bloch’s novel and make from it a film as great as Psycho — not just original and compelling but extraordinarily beautiful too.

Sacha Gervasi, the director of Hitchcock, a film about the making of Psycho, doesn’t have a trace of it. That potentially this is highly interesting subject matter is proven by the well-researched book, Alfred Hitchcock and The Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello, on which the movie draws. But what Gervasi and his scriptwriter John McLaughlin bring to the table are banality and predictability, quintessentially non-Hitchcockian qualities.

What would be the two most obvious ways to interpret this story for the present day? First, to suggest that Hitchcock himself was tormented by the same dark urges as Norman Bates (and his real-life model, the Wisconsin necrophile Ed Gein) and that’s why he was able to realise them so vividly in his film. Thus the cake can be unbaked. That should please those who prefer to think that works of art arrive through such spillage, rather than being achieved through creativity.

Second, to hint that the real force behind Hitchcock was his wife, Alma. There’s a whole biographical industry based on this manoeuvre now — Nora powering James Joyce, Vivienne inspiring T S Eliot, etc — and the film embraces this dim trend too.

There can never be any real suspense about what’s going to happen here — Psycho is going to be finished and become Hitchcock’s greatest success — so obstacles have to be concocted. Hitchcock had real problems with getting Psycho financed (when Paramount got cold feet, he put up the money himself, using his house as collateral) and with getting it past the censors.

To these have been added marital discord. Alma Hitchcock becomes involved with a mediocre playboy scriptwriter, Whit, provoking Hitchcock to murderous paroxysms of jealousy, particularly crassly shown during his direction of the famous shower scene. During his darkest moments, Hitchcock has hallucinatory encounters with gruesome Gein, to salt the story a little further.

None of these efforts to bring this quasi-documentary film to dramatic life works very well, despite its impressive cast. Anthony Hopkins dons lots of latex and padding and remembers always to lean backwards as though to counterbalance a massive belly — but the strange way that in Hitchcock’s face the flab was brought alive by the force of his personality doesn’t come through the prosthetics. They remain inert. Though Hopkins might look like Hitchcock, he doesn’t look fully human here.

As Alma, Helen Mirren proves she can easily keep company with Hopkins, having a formidable presence of her own, sexual, pert and decisive. She’s much freer than Hopkins to make up her character, of course (there seems to be no film of Alma). Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Biel are as fetching as they need to be as, respectively, Janet Leigh and Vera Miles, the actress who played the heroine’s sister.

But the film just feels phoney throughout and suffers from coming after the BBC/HBO film The Girl, starring Toby Jones and Sienna Miller, which presented Hitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren as abusive. That may have been no more than nasty invention but at least it didn’t collapse into romcom as corny as this. “I’ll never be able to find a Hitchcock blonde as beautiful as you,” Hitchcock tells Alma on their reconciliation. “I’ve waited 30 years to hear you say that,” she replies. “That, my dear, is why they call me the master of suspense.” says Hitchcock. That’s awful.

We still relish Hitchcock’s own films, so full of his rare sensibility; Gervasi’s film of Hitchcock can’t compete. Why bother?

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