There is a speech delivered by Helen Mirren in Hitchcock that begins bluntly and
forcefully, before becoming one of those acting moments that gets played over
and over again at awards shows. It’s a moment of performance that can so
quickly and easily become overwrought, but then you realize that Mirren is an
actress of incredible skill, subtlety, and professionalism that she won’t let
her performance overshadow her character. She plays Alma Reville, the great
director Alfred Hitchcock’s long-suffering wife and behind-the-scenes
collaborator. She holds the film together and although Hitchcock is ostensibly concerned with the making of Psycho, that’s really just a backdrop
for the way their marriage functioned and occasionally faltered.
Her big speech is delivered to Hitch in a blistering
scene when emotions have finally come to a head with her frustrations with playing
second fiddle to, and walking two steps behind, the world’s most famous
director, and with his obsession with his blonde leading ladies. And he has
grown suspicious of her friendship with Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), a family
friend and writer who wants her help with a treatment of his book and perhaps a
little something more if she’s willing.
Mirren probably has the toughest acting job in the film.
She’s playing a real woman whom no one really knows much about and she’s
playing opposite Anthony Hopkins as a man most people know at least a little
something about. Additionally there’s Scarlett Johansson, sexy and formidable
as Janet Leigh; Jessica Biel as Vera Miles; an absolutely wonderful Toni
Collette as Peggy, Hitch’s longtime assistant; Michael Stuhlbarg as Hitch’s
agent Lew Wasserman; Ralph Macchio as Joseph Stefano; and James D’Arcy doing
what seems more like a cameo impersonation of Anthony Perkins. Hopkins has to
tackle a fair amount of mimicry in bringing Hitch to life on screen. He’s
well-padded to a suitable level of corpulence ad he’s got what I imagine must
be very impressive prosthetic jowls. We know about Hitchcock the sardonic wit,
but we know far less about his private life and this is where Hopkins really
has the chance to show us something. He allows us to enter Hitch’s vulnerability,
his fear that he’ll make a bad movie, or worse, that he’ll make a movie no one
likes. We see him almost debilitatingly insecure to the point he becomes
physically ill and Alma has to run the on-set crew so they don’t fall even
further behind schedule on their self-financed movie. Hitch was certain that Psycho should be his next movie in order
to do something different. What if a great director tackled the horror genre?
Paramount was less certain and wouldn’t put up the money. So Hitch puts up his
house and Alma, understanding wife that she is, agrees to go along whether he
fails or not.
The movie rarely fails to be engaging. There are
fantastic myths and legends surrounding the making of Psycho and the way Hitchcock habitually treated his leading ladies.
Some of the movie comes across as if it’s contributing to legend, but John J.
McLaughlin’s screenplay is adapted from Stephen Rebello’s book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho,
a notoriously well-researched treatise on the facts behind the making of one of
the most famous films in history. McLaughlin keeps the story well within the
limits of documented history, at least as far as the details of the filmmaking
process are concerned. I have no doubt some the drama at the Hitchcock home is
more than a bit embellished for dramatic purposes.
There’s the detail that Stefano, who wrote the Psycho screenplay, was in therapy
dealing with issues regarding his mother. Anthony Perkins, in his initial
meeting with Hitch about playing Norman Bates, reveals that as a child he
wished his father dead, and then got his wish at age six. A lot of these
moments are presented whimsically, with a wink toward legend. In fact, the tone
of the movie parries, sometimes unsteadily, between humor, drama, and the
macabre. It switches abruptly to dark scenes within Hitch’s mind in which he
imagines conversations with Ed Gein, the serial killer who inspired the novel Psycho. I suppose that’s a style that
befits the subject. After all, Hitch was a notorious wit and you can find
subtle gallows humor in all his films. But director Sacha Gervasi never quite
settles the film comfortably in one mode.
In spite of this, he manages to cobble together a
fiendishly entertaining, and at times suspenseful, film from a non-fiction
book. He succeeds at showing us how one of cinema’s most famous films was made
and does it without ever showing any clips or even recreating shots (they didn’t’
secure the rights from Universal). Though the film’s title suggests the Master
of Suspense is the centerpiece, it is really the relationship between him and
Alma that drives the picture. In that regard, the film is warm, loving, and
sincere with two masterful performances to draw us into its soft embrace.
Great Review Jason! I hope to see the pic soon!
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