Hitchcock

Sacha Gervasi – 2012 – USA

Not at all sure what went wrong here.  Great cast, great premise.  It should have been something like Capote (2005) in profiling a famous person during a single key episode of his life, which I always prefer to the sprawling, episodic bio-pic format that we usually see; (J. Edgar, anyone?)  I guess the bulk of the blame has to rest with director Gervasi, but since I don’t know anything about him, I can’t say if he’s bad or just weak.  I do certainly blame screenwriter John J. McLaughlin too, who seems to have done this job as a routine assignment with no special knowledge or appreciation of the subject at all.  It’s not a bad film; it’s just overwhelmingly unexceptional.  For one thing, Anthony Hopkins’ performance and especially his weird make-up were distractingly unconvincing throughout.  This is a man who has played Hitler, Picasso and Nixon on film, all brilliantly (and with little make-up too); that’s why this situation is all the more baffling.  The only thing I can suggest is that maybe the film would have worked better if Hitchcock as a character was unseen entirely and the story only revolved around the people working with him.  It’s really a story of artistic heroism; the great risks that Hitchcock, at the height of his power, took in getting the film Psycho (1960) made.  No one believed in it except him and he made it happen by sheer force of will, and in the process inaugurated the new openness of the 60s, leading to the ratings system we still have today.  Even after all this time, Psycho is still pungently a modern film, a distinct break from the ways, style and attitudes of Old Hollywood.   Little of this significance comes across in Hitchcock the film, though.  I’m a Hitchcock expert, so I have my share of hairsplitting to do, but nevertheless, I don’t actually expect a mainstream film about Hitchcock to do much more than this film does, nor to get to the heart of Hitchcock’s concerns as an artist.  In that regard, I was willing to go along with whatever the film had to offer, as long as it was interesting.  Instead, though, it was just kind of awkward and scattered and uninvolving.  We get some sense of Hitchcock as an eccentric showman, but very little of his real personality and almost none of his rigorous cinematic philosophy.  I will say that James D’Arcy is an amusingly close dead-ringer for Anthony Perkins, but that was about my favorite thing in the film.