Sascha Gervasi’s Hitchcock,
written by John J. McLaughlin, is a thoroughly entertaining, but ultimately
uneven film about the Master of Suspense’s professional struggles to finance,
make, and promote Psycho, and his
personal problems with his long suffering wife, Alma Reville. The best thing
the film does is treat its title character not as a legend, but as a person. Half
behind the scenes look at the inner workings of Hollywood during its last
decade of innocence and half family drama, the movie’s different segments,
however, vary greatly in quality and tone.
Opening on a quiet prologue taking place in 1940s rural
Wisconsin, the casual tone is firmly set when the peaceful tableau turns into a
gruesome family murder, and the camera pans to reveal the title character’s
portly presence, calmly sipping a cup of tea while directly addressing the
audience, as he did in his famous “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” show. Brother has
been killing brother since Cain and Abel, Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) croons is
his incomparable British drawl; who is he to deprive us of the pleasure of
watching it happen on the silver screen?
As Hitchcock’s
story starts in 1959, the filmmaker has just premiered North by Northwest to great popularity and success. The character
is sixty years old, and keeps getting advice to quit while he’s ahead. In an
effort to prove he still has “something fresh, something different” to offer
the world, he starts wondering what a horror film would look like if it was
made by a good director.
Against unwavering criticism and disapproval, he sets his
mind on Robert Bloch’s “Psycho.” Battling the studios, censors, and even his at
first reluctant wife, who find the novel distasteful, Hitch (“hold the cock”)
decides to risk everything and finance the picture himself, mortgaging the
house and endangering Alma’s beloved pool.
“All of us harbor dark recesses of violence and horror,”
Hitchcock says in his whispery brogue, and although everyone is opposed to the
movie—“I’ve seen happier faces on a school bus going off a cliff,” agent Lew
Wasserman tells the director after he has announced his new project—“they can’t
stop looking, can they?” Hitchcock knew how to draw on and out our deepest
desires and fears, and although the studio heads and Production Code aficionados
didn’t like to admit it, they couldn’t turn away. He took risks, experimented,
and invented new ways of making pictures. His films touched something deep
within audiences, unfolding not onscreen but within the viewers’ imaginations.
Which is why it is so frustrating that we never figure out
exactly what went on within Hitchcock’s imagination when he worked on the movies,
as is the fact that Gervasi’s Hitchcock
plays it so safe.
Viewers expecting a closer look and deeper understanding of
the man behind the myth will mostly be disappointed. Although we get a loving,
yet fairly level gaze at the great director’s family life, Alfred Hitchcock is
as much of an enigma at the end as he was in the beginning.
The strength of Hitchcock
lies in the irreproachable performance of its actors, with few exceptions. James
D’Arcy is uncanny as a high-strung, awkward Anthony Perkins; Scarlett Johansson
doesn’t look exactly like Janet Leigh, Psycho’s
leggy leading lady, but she channels her intelligence, warmth, and pluck; as
shapely starlet Vera Miles, Jessica Biel is effective but forgettable. Hopkins,
portraying the director as a dour, arrogant, yet playful individual, creates an
almost endearing version of the man behind some of cinema’s greatest classics. An
impressive makeup job and imposing fat suit obliterate the actor from our minds
so we can only see the character. But the pulsing, warm heart of the movie is
Helen Mirren’s Alma, a woman as talented and intelligent as she is kind and
loving. She offers her husband full support on his work and cares for him as a
patient mother might for a stubborn child.
Alma, the woman who penned Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, was content to live in her husband’s shadow for
most of their almost sixty-year long marriage. A constant source of support,
collaborator, inspiration, producer, script revisionist, assistant editor, and
even director (when Hitchcock couldn’t make it to the set), Alma contributed to
almost every one of the filmmaker’s works and was never credited—except when
Hitchcock won his AFI lifetime achievement award, the end postcards inform us,
when he said he shares the award, as he has his life, with his wife.
The one faltering side-story of Hitchcock involves Alma beginning a series of secret meetings with friend
Whitfield Cook devoted to working on his new script; these interactions perk Hitch’s
suspicion and jealousy. Cook, a sycophantic screenwriter, acts as a perfect
foil to the stand-offish, dismissive director. Although this section makes us
understand how Alma cannot get what she wants at home and is attracted to the
idea of a relationship with another man, if never to its fulfillment, the story
of her and Cook overstays its welcome.
When Hitchcock accuses her of having an affair, especially
as he glances dreamily towards his blondes, his wife runs out of patience. The
scene in which an upset Alma tells her husband off is one of the best in recent
cinema; by the end you’ll be cheering for Mirren.
However, the film’s loveliest, most memorable scene, in
which Hopkins acts as conductor to Bernard Herrman’s screeching violins and the
audience’s screams from outside the theater on the film’s premiere night, is a sad
indicator of all that Hitchcock could
have been and isn’t: filled with the thrills and joys of discovery, a haunting
look at the man who has just orchestrated his greatest success through sheer
will, happy accident, and tremendous artistic talent both at filmmaking and
grifting.
Hitchcock is a good movie. Anyone who knows and loves Alfred
Hitchcock’s films will be intrigued, and those who don’t will be entertained by
way of a flurry of priceless one-liners. But Hitchcock, although some moments suggest otherwise, isn’t a great
film. It’s the kind of film that leaves you longing for more, longing for a
great movie. Perhaps some Hitchcock.
This is a very thorough review, but it seems too thorough. Leave a little to the imagination. But, once again, very well done.
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