Based on the book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello, 2012's Hitchcock is a mildly diverting but ultimately undernourished attempt to put the 'Master of Suspense' under the biopic spotlight. As the eponymous director, Anthony Hopkins gives his best and most enthusiastic performance since 2005's The World's Fastest Indian, utilising his gift for impersonation to assume Hitchcock's speech patterns, gait, and (with the aid of some impressively invisible prosthetics) body shape. Even the fact that he's now in his mid-seventies and considerably older than Hitchcock is supposed to be here, this is his most spry and physically nimble screen appearance in years, especially when set against his phoned-in supporting roles in the likes of The Wolfman and Thor. Despite looking very little like their real-life counterparts, the female leads acquit themselves as well as they can. Helen Mirren gives the role of Hitchcock's wife Alma Reville a recognisable persona, but whilst it's by no means a bad performance, it finally amounts to little more than a reprisal of the 'ballsy wife' she's played dozens of times before. Though she's only five years younger than Janet Leigh was when she made Psycho, Scarlett Johansson fails to capture Leigh's fulsome, womanly bearing, and relies mainly on the script's affection for the actress to get her through, creating a sexy characterisation of a very sexy movie icon, whilst Jessica Biel (who also looks younger than the character she's playing, though in this case she's not) is effectively 'dressed down', not only highlighting the awful wardrobe and hairstyle of Psycho's Lila Crane, but also effectively disguising the fact that she's a considerably sexier actress than Vera Miles ever was. The actors playing the secondary male characters fare even less well; though he's playing Anthony Perkins, James D'Arcy actually channels Norman Bates instead, whilst Danny Huston has a throwaway role as horn-dog screenwriter Whitfield Cook, and does nothing with it (his character only seems to have been included in the film to give Mirren more scenes). There are also several missteps with the movie's storyline; the Ed Gein angle is over played, both in terms of its influence on Psycho the film, and Hitchcock the man. I find it hard to believe that even a figure as notoriously black-humoured as Hitchcock was supposed to be would have passed around ghastly photographs of a serial killer's victims at a movie launch party, especially in 1960 and given the rocky ride the film had to go on to get made. In any case, whilst the Gein murders clearly had some bearing on Robert Bloch's source novel, Anthony Perkins' portrayal of the clean-cut, acceptably dressed, boyishly oddball Norman Bates bears no resemblance whatsoever to the real-life Gein, who was by all accounts a shambling, scruffy, inarticulate, and far more obviously disturbed freak; if Hitchcock was as obsessed by him as he is supposed to be here, then the movie interpretation would surely have been far more accurate? What really irritated, however, is the appearance of Gein as a phantomlike figment of Hitchcock's imagination, who he empathises with and relates to as a friend on some level, in the same way that the 'imaginary friend' of Christian Slater's protagonist in True Romance (1993) is his hero Elvis Presley. For a start, I doubt that an artist as intelligent and successful as the 'Master of Suspense' would have been flattered by the idea that he found solace and comfort from his personal problems by relating them in any way to those of a bottom-feeding lunatic like the 'Ghoul of Wisconsin'; but even if you buy this, the notion of Gein appearing in ghostly form to Hitchcock is stupid since the real-life Gein was still very much alive when Psycho was being made (and if he was as interested in Gein as the movie makes him out to be, Hitchcock would have known this), indeed, he only died in 1984, several years after Hitchcock himself. Though it remains watchable thanks to likable stars and a relatively anaemic (indeed semi-comic) tone, Hitchcock finally feels very insubstantial in terms of what it set out to achieve. Whereas TV movie The Girl (also 2012) met with fans' scorn because of its rubbishing of Hitchcock's public persona and insistence that he was, at heart, a cruel pervert, this film is more affectionate but not necessarily more understanding, writing off his deep-seated psychological fixations as nothing more than harmless fetishes that influenced his work for the better and which, moreover, were nothing for his wife to worry about because glamorous young women with the world at their feet like Leigh, Grace Kelly and Kim Novak wouldn't have touched Hitchcock with a barge pole. Certainly no more impressive as a piece of filmmaking than The Girl was, this feels like it should have been produced for television too, and whilst it's reasonably diverting, it's not a film I'll be revisiting over and over again.
Review of Hitchcock
