This review is also available in a revised and slightly truncated version at InRO. Below is my original version:
There seems to be some sense that
critics have responded unfavorably to Sacha Gervasi’s “Hitchcock” because
someone has dared assault ‘our’ (that is, critics) sacred cow. There might be
some credence to this claim if “Hitchcock” wasn’t simply an average, run-of-the-mill-mediocrity.
Indeed, it’s difficult to muster even some incredulousness in the face of such
a simple… bore.
Ostensibly detailing the creation
of “Psycho”, from initial idea to selling it (or not) to a skeptical studio,
from self-financing to marital discord through editing woes all the way to
release, and subsequent success, this story would seem the stuff of interesting
drama. And yet Gervasi’s endeavor, along with screenwriter John J. McLaughlin,
working from Stephen Rebello’s ‘Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho’, just
sits there, devoid of interest. It is certainly some kind of bitter irony that
a story detailing one of the great films of all time is itself so monumentally
inconsequential. One could ask who exactly this film was made for – those who
are familiar with Hitchcock and his work are the most likely to take issue with
the film’s many, many liberties, while those with little (or no) knowledge of
Hitch, if one could even get them to watch the film in the first place, would
be left with little (or no) understanding of what the ‘big deal’ is. Michael
Atkinson puts it nicely: ‘The biopic is in many ways a kind of cinema that
ferments and thrives on some of its audience's least reasonable instincts. It
represents a form of gossip-and-sideshow spectacle that has little, in the end,
to do with film, filmmaking, acting or, most of all, narrative. It is no small
matter to ask, as movie viewers, why we're watching a particular piece
of narrative cinema.’
In what must have seemed on paper
as the height of clever self-reference, the film begins with Anthony Hopkins
introducing the proceeding movie as if it were an episode of the television
program “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with
breaking the fourth wall, with Hopkins
addressing the audience directly and making droll jokes about Ed Gein and his
various crimes. I suppose the whole thing is supposed to set a tone, a kind of
playful banter, which wouldn’t be entirely inappropriate regarding a showman
such as Hitch. Still, the film varies so wildly from scene to scene that one
wonders if even the filmmakers knew if they were making a comedy or not. Hopkins
talks to an imagined spectre of Gein throughout the film, in what Glenn Kenny
has described as ‘serial killer burlesque’; it’s an absurd rhetorical device
that serves mainly as a tool for obvious exposition. Later, when Hitchcock
falls ill during shooting, the film presents it as some kind of cumulative
explosion, the pressure of his life finally convalescing into literal breakdown
as spirit-animal-Gein prods Hitch into delirious fits of jealousy. Hitchcock was,
in fact, suffering from a simple flu of some sort.
It’s during this flu-episode that
Helen Mirren as Alama Reville is, in the context of the film, finally given her
day in the sun. Tending to her ill husband, she’s informed that the set is in
shambles, that they are hopelessly behind schedule and that further delays are
costing the Hitchcock’s reams of money (the fact that they have mortgaged their
home to partially self finance “Psycho” is apparently true). Alma
marches onto set and immediately wrangles the crew, determined to get some work
done. To drive the point home, there’s some business with some extras in the
background literally staring at each other slack jawed, apparently besides
themselves that this woman could come on set and command it like a general (or
– gasp – like Hitchcock himself. Subtext alert). There’s certainly an
interesting book to be written about Alama’s contribution to her husband’s
work. She has some kind of credit on something like more than 20 of his films,
and there’s no doubt that she was a key collaborator. But “Hitchcock” stacks
the deck too much in the other direction. There’s no evidence whatsoever that
she directed anything during Hitch’s illness, and there is ample evidence that
Hitch, once better, simply re-shot most of the footage at a later date anyway.
Gervasi does no favors to Alma, feminism, or the historical record by
fabricating her contributions to Hitch’s oeuvre while ignoring the very real
work she must have done, simply by virtue of that real work being less
dramatic. It should also be noted that Hitchcock himself was very effusive and
open with praise for his wife. He speaks about her with much regularity in ‘Hitchcock/Truffaut’,
at least eleven times by my count, behind only David O. Selznick, Grace Kelly,
Cary Grant and James Stewart (and tied with Janet Leigh, for the record).
It’s also distressing to see
Gervasi use the famous shower sequence as another facile expression of Hitch’s
supposed mental state, as he has Hopkins
personally pantomime stabbing Scarlett Johansson’s Janet Leigh over and over
again. Bill Krohn supplies evidence that the shower sequence was shot over a
period of several days separated by weeks, with and without Leigh, and that
various pick-up shots were filmed as Hitch assembled a rough cut and decided
what was and wasn’t working. Certainly, Gervasi needn’t show such nitty gritty
detail in an admittedly popular entertainment, but further obscuring the facts
of the sequence to turn it into a wobbly metaphor for an imagined character
flaw is, frankly, beyond the pail.
Indeed the film seems determined to
linger over every supposed salacious detail, any and all possible deviances
Hitchcock purportedly indulged in. Hopkins-as-Hitchcock
is constantly leering at blonde women, with other characters occasionally
dropping the film-crit term ‘Hitchcock blonde’, as if they were retroactively
analyzing him. Character flaws become over-simplified cause-and-effect
arm-chair psychology: a hard day at the office and a fight with Alma
cuts to Hitch furiously wolfing down can after can of pate. Get it? Because
he’s a fat man, as if such an insight adds anything to our collective knowledge
of the director or what fueled his work.
I’ve barely mentioned the work of
Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johannsen, James D’Arcy and others. Frankly,
there’s not much to say, as all indulge in the most simplistic
characterizations that likely bare little resemblance to the actual people in
question. I’ll reiterate, complete factual fidelity isn’t any kind of
pre-requisite towards my liking or disliking a project. But these performances
border on the cartoonish. D’Arcy, for instance, does a fantastic impersonation
of Norman Bates, but ignores the fact that Anthony Perkins was an actor, a
skilled performer. The film “Hitchcock” would have us believe that Perkins was,
essentially, Bates, with no differentiation between performer and role. The
less said about Ralph Macchio’s brief appearance as screenwriter Joseph Stefano
the better.
Ultimately, the truly great
directors left us their own autobiographies inscribed in their bodies of work –
Nick Ray and his doomed romanticism; John Ford and his contradictory celebration
of the individual versus encroaching society; Howard Hawks and his stoic sense
of humor, and solidarity, in the face of an uncaring and unflinching universe.
We can do much better by Hitchcock then indulging in this awards bait
mediocrity – we can revisit, and celebrate, his films. Thankfully, they are
sufficiently adequate to survive this momentary blip on the pop culture
landscape, a movie as sure to be forgotten as the next Oscar ceremony in which
it is sure to be ignored.
