Runtime: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Sacha Gervasi
Quick Impressions:
When the end credits rolled, I could swear that I saw a costumer named Grayson Kelly. I’ve been totally unable to confirm this, however, and now it’s going to bother me for the rest of the weekend. Given the director’s well known obsession with Grace Kelly (and the number of costume changes she had in the movie Rear Window alone), Grayson Kelly is pretty much the perfect name for someone making costumes for a film about Alfred Hitchcock. I stared at the name until it scrolled off the top of the screen, so I’m positive I read it correctly. Who is this Grayson Kelly, and why can’t I find out more about him on the internet?
(Hopefully I’ll shake my new obsession faster than Hitchcock got over Grace Kelly, because an endless fascination with Grayson Kelly sounds comparatively devoid of glamour.)
At any rate, my excitement to see this film has vacillated continuously since I learned of its existence. First I thought, A project about the making of Psycho, that sounds fun. Then I saw, They’re moving up the release date! They must see that the Oscar race is unusually wide open with a huge weakness in Best Actress and a lot of confusion in the Actor category. Maybe the movie is better than they expected. It must be really good.
And then—really for no good reason—I suddenly started thinking Yeah, but it’s probably not that good. (The thing is, if it were that good, why not plan it as a late November release in the first place?) (I’m too suspicious, I know. But on the other hand, isn’t that what Alfred Hitchcock would want from a potential audience member?)
Anyway, I went in with ever-changing expectations and the knowledge that Helen Mirren has received both SAG and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress while Anthony Hopkins has not been nominated at all. I found Mirren’s nominations deserved and Hopkins’s performance far better than I expected. (He’s a wonderful actor, but it’s hard to imagine him as Hitchcock, and he hasn’t been nominated for the performance yet, so I didn’t expect an earth-shattering turn.) He’s quite good, though.
And the movie is fun to watch. That’s the best part.
The Good:
As a long-time admirer of Tippi Hedren’s brief film career, I’ve been reading up on the other Hitchcock movie currently playing —HBO Original The Girl—with great interest. Of course, listening to Hedren’s traumatic anecdotes gives one a rather unfavorable impression of Alfred Hitchcock (even though Hedren herself has repeatedly admitted that Hitchcock was a brilliant director, despite his quirks). He comes across as some demented, power-hungry pervert who thought it was perfectly morally acceptable, professional behavior to surprise an actress by throwing live birds into her face until she had to be taken to the emergency room.
That’s really not very nice. (Of course, the scene is brilliant.) And though Hedren’s testimony about Hitchcock’s controlling, manipulative, coercive, career-destroying behavior can be dismissed as the bitterness of one person (though I believe she’s telling the truth), I’ve heard other stories about Alfred Hitchcock’s sadistic (yet effective) methods. For instance, supposedly, on the set of Rebecca, he convinced Joan Fontaine (playing The Second Mrs. DeWinter) that while he was in her corner, the rest of the cast thought she was giving a horrible performance and wanted her fired. He did this, of course, to coax out the kind of paranoia, insecurity, and worry of inadequacy her character should show while interacting with the more established residents of Manderley. That’s not very nice, either. (But Fontaine’s performance is fantastic.)
My point is, I went in worrying that Hitchcock would present us with the disturbing portrait of a really very awful man who got off on tormenting starlets and didn’t care whom he hurt, but the movie isn’t depressing and demented like that at all. Instead, it’s practically a comedy, teeming with the sort of antic, macabre glee that Hitchcock’s screen persona usually delivered.
Although the plot does center on the making of the movie Psycho, the film is actually about the director’s relationship with his wife, and as played by Anthony Hopkins, Hitchcock comes across as a flawed but ultimately sympathetic fellow. At the very least, you don’t hate him. While surely most women won’t watch and think, What a perfect husband! If only I could marry a little hunk of heaven like that, Hopkins’s Hitchcock is much more likable than, say, Keira Knightley’s Anna Karenina. He’s a tormented artist who has unparalleled genius but needs reining in (both professionally and socially). And though an ongoing, tormented obsession with an unattainable, mysterious, Grace-Kellyesque blonde fuels his elaborate fantasy life, in reality, he’s in love with his wife and quite dependent on her in a number of ways.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Anthony Hopkins):
I know that Hopkins isn’t nominated for anything yet, but I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility for him to sneak in there at the last minute. As far as Oscar chances go, things are unusually up in the air this year. I can’t remember the last time all the front-runners didn’t seem like locks at this point in the season.
(Right now, if I had to make a guess, I’d say that Best Actor nominations will belong to five of the following six men: Daniel Day-Lewis, John Hawkes, Denzel Washington, Hugh Jackman, Bradley Cooper, and Joaquin Phoenix, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Oscar nominations matched SAG nominations exactly. But it’s always possible that only four of these fellows will make it, and somebody like Bill Murray or Anthony Hopkins (or somebody else) will slip into the fifth slot.)
Hopkins is a brilliant actor, and he makes a more convincing Hitchcock than I would have
expected. Personally, my favorite moment comes when he collects and produces the sand.
You see such pain, such paranoia, and such dramatic flourish! In these scenes, Hitchcock comes across as petty and childish and small and larger-than-life and vulnerable and grand. And all at once!
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Helen Mirren):
Helen Mirren deserves an Oscar nomination for her performance as Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s longsuffering wife and key collaborator. I’m pretty sure that she’ll get one, too, though I still haven’t seen the performances of Jessica Chastain, Marion Cotillard, Naomi Watts, Rachel Weisz, and Emmanuelle Riva.
(This category is much harder to figure out than Actor. Lawrence and Chastain seem like locks for nominations, and Cotillard and Mirren seem quite likely to join them to me. (And let’s not forget about adorable child actress Quvenzhané Wallis.) I don’t know who the other three Actress nominees will be, but I’d be shocked if one of them were Keira Knightley, and I really like Helen Mirren’s chances.)
Mirren is better in the movie than Hopkins, simply because most people don’t have a preconceived idea of what Alma Reville was like, so she doesn’t have to worry about imitation. (The photographs of her that I’ve seen look nothing at all like Mirren, but that doesn’t matter because unlike her husband, Alma’s not an easily recognizable figure whose image is engraved in the public consciousness.)
The character is very likable. She should appeal to women. Some will admire her because she’s very strong, capable, talented, and clever. However, she’s also a devoted wife (with a difficult husband) who is having trouble in her marriage, which will win over people for whom all those positive qualities just aren’t enough. She should appeal to men, too, because she is, in the end, a devoted wife, and she’s played by Helen Mirren who manages to be sexy, witty, and vivacious at the age of sixty-seven (a Herculean feat in Hollywood).
Mirren plays several scenes notably well. I love her response to the sand. That’s probably a scene for an Oscar clip if she does, in fact, get nominated.
Best Scene:
The most energized scene in the movie happens when Hitchcock peeps in at an audience about to watch the most memorable scene in Psycho. Everything comes to a climax here in such a lovely, funny, delightful way.
The Other Performances:
I liked James D’Arcy in Cloud Atlas, but here I think he’s too much like Anthony Perkins for his own good. He has the nervousness and inflection down, but he just doesn’t have enough oomph. I watched his first scene thinking, You know who could have played this part better? Who’s that guy I’m thinking of? Oh yeah! Anthony Perkins!
Obviously, Anthony Perkins cannot play himself (though considering he’s dead, that would be terrific stunt casting!) But the problem with D’Arcy is, he reminds me of Perkins just enough to make me remember that Perkins has much more charisma and stage presence. In fairness, however, I don’t know who could have played the part better, and I do love the way Hitchcock slyly torments D’Arcy’s uncomfortably closeted Perkins over and over again.
(Perkins was a brilliant actor even without Hitchcock there to torture him, though. He’s marvelous in Murder on the Orient Express. I mean, that seems a lot like stunt casting because he’s playing a character quite similar in some ways to Norman Bates, but he still has way more screen presence than James D’Arcy.)
Toni Collette has a pretty substantial (in terms of sheer screen time) supporting role as Hitchcock’s invaluable assistant Peggy Robertson. I thought she was made up particularly well. Recognizing her took me a second. The character doesn’t get any significant development, but Collette’s presence on screen is important because someone must act opposite and react to Hitchcock and the chaos around him.
Scarlett Johansson is just fine as Janet Leigh, a character who is refreshingly not dragged through the mud. (Movies about Hollywood always seem to zero in on corruption, decadence, depravity, and how awful and disgusting everyone was, and anybody married to Tony Curtis obviously has some connection to sleazy scandal, but Johansson’s Leigh keeps her life with “Tony and the kids” private, and reveals only that her family likes candy corn.) Johansson is an attractive woman and a good actress who has grown on me over the years. She didn’t really remind me that much of Janet Leigh, but, then, I hardly ever think of Janet Leigh. (Her ex-husband and daughter have left much more of an impression on me, I’m afraid.) Watching her is a pleasure even though she’s not exactly channeling Janet Leigh.
Jessica Biel is pretty good as Vera Miles, too. Even though I know she has a pretty successful film career and is married to Justin Timberlake, I remember her mainly from Seventh Heaven (a show that, like Dawson’s Creek, I only watched occasionally with my Grandma because she got sucked into both of them). I wish Miles’s character had lingered a little longer. She was actually far more interesting than Janet Leigh, even though I
think Johansson’s performance was a little better than Biel’s. I suppose those interested in Miles’s take on Hitchcock can watch the movie The Girl since Miles seems to have the same sorts of issues with Hitch that Tippi Hedron did.
Danny Huston is wonderfully unlikable as Alma’s friend, writer Whitfield Cook, whose presence gives Mirren’s character more to do than simply be overlooked by Hitchcock.
Michael Stuhlbarg (who has had a busy year) makes Hitchcock’s agent Lew Wasserman likable but sort of vague. And Richard Portnow makes studio executive Barney Balaban delightfully aggravating. Kurtwood Smith (best known to me as the dad on That Seventies Show) makes censor Geoffrey Shurlock more compelling than he probably should be.
But by far, my favorite supporting cast member was Ralph Macchio. It’s not that he did anything so fantastic, but he was so distracting. Playing the screenwriter, he was only in the movie for like three minutes. Just long enough for me to whisper to my husband, “Who is that guy? I know that guy. Wait! Is it Ralph Macchio?” And then he was gone. Wax on, wax off.
Funniest Scene:
I liked the opening scene (and the closing one, too). When I realized what they were doing, it definitely made me smile. It’s a nice bit of tongue-in-cheek cleverness that doesn’t get in the way of the main drama experienced by the fairly well developed characters.
Also fantastic was Hitchcock’s expertly timed final remark to his wife.
Best Action Sequence:
Maybe I should call it an “Action!” sequence. I loved all the scenes of Hitchcock directing on set, and would have liked more to be honest. But the sequence of Janet Leigh driving while Hitchcock yells at her, ratcheting up the intensity really worked for me, partially because I recalled the scene in Psycho and found the behind-the-scenes look at the director’s peculiar method fascinating. Also, Scarlett Johansson does some of her
best work here (probably because she had the film to study).
The Negatives:
Perhaps there should be more time devoted to what happened on set while making Psycho (except that then James D’Arcy’s inability to be the actual Anthony Perkins likely would have annoyed me more). All of the scenes of Hitchcock directing by unconventional methods—whether he was attacking Leigh during filming or unnerving Perkins between takes—are simply riveting. And the moment when Alma finally shows up to work is pretty great, too.
Of course, the real story is about the relationship between Alma and Alfred, and Mirren and Hopkins do supply by far the strongest performances, portraying the most well-developed characters. The cabin on the beach storyline gives Mirren’s character something to do, but the banality of what results—while its discomforting, demoralizing surprise is probably something that everybody can relate to—is a bit less than invigorating in the telling. (I mean, that’s something that’s probably happened, in one form or another, to everyone, but the making of Psycho is something unique most people were not a part of.) I don’t mean that the cabin-on-the-beach stuff isn’t good or isn’t necessary. (Indeed, its emotional payoff is what makes Mirren’s part particularly Oscar worthy, and we need it, too, to understand something important but not obvious about Alfred.) But it is drawn out and sometimes seems to be distracting us from the more interesting story about the making of the film.
I’m also not so sure that Hitchcock’s creative hallucinations quite worked because they were so ill-defined. Is he actually hallucinating or merely lost in the creative process? I realize that the answer is that it doesn’t matter since he’s producing great work and that’s his process. But from the point of view of a wife trying to keep him healthy, it does actually matter a little bit.
Overall:
Hitchcock is a fun movie to watch. It makes the great director seem a bit less horrible than most recent media about him. What begins with a kind of bleak, desperate obsession with remaining relevant, and develops quickly into an almost unhealthy fixation with a gruesome murderer, somehow ultimately segues into a sweet, beautiful love story about the powerful and complicated partnership between a tormented auteur and his strong yet vulnerable wife. Mirren’s performance is particularly strong, and I enjoyed the movie much more than I expected.