Hitchcock (2012)

½*/****
starring Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collette
screenplay by John J. McLaughlin, based on Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello
directed by Sacha Gervasi 

by Walter Chaw It's hard to know
where to even begin to pick apart Sacha Gervasi's dishonourable drag show Hitchcock,
a schlock domestic melodrama with Anthony Hopkins delivering a freak impersonation of Alfred Hitchcock from under a ton of prosthetics that make him look
not like Sir Alfred, but like Jim Sturgess as a heroic celestial from Cloud
Atlas. Start with the framing story, in which Wisconsin necrophiliac and
amateur taxidermist Ed Gein (Michael Wincott, one of the only inspired bits of casting in the entire benighted project) acts as Hitch's father confessor,
greatest confidant, and Freudian conduit to the darker recesses of the auteur's soul. He appears, see, the way Dustin Hoffman's imaginary monk
appeared to Milla Jovovich's Joan of Arc in Luc Besson's The Messenger:
In one scene, Hitch, on a couch, admits to Ed that he has unwholesome
thoughts about his leading ladies now and again. It's that obsession for the
"Hitchcock blonde" that leads to the discovery of a few sticky head
shots in Hitch's den, and for the everlasting resentment of mousy wife Alma
(not-mousy Helen Mirren), who decides to have her own fling with failed writer
Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston)–one of several credited writers on Hitchcock's Stage
Fright and Strangers on a Train, though Hitchcock doesn't mention
that. It doesn't mention much. I suspect that's because no one involved
knows anything, which is quite extraordinary when you consider that possibly no
other director in the history of Hollywood has had more written about him than Alfred Hitchcock.

Lo, it's not long
before Hitch realizes how much he needs Alma's help to punch up his latest
project, Psycho, and for Alma to realize that good ol' Whit is just
using her, toying with her aging emotions, to get Hitch to read his awful
screenplays. Alma, see, is shamed back into the arms of our lovable letch,
glimpsed in a humiliating film's most humiliating moment humbly thanking Janet
Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) for being "a professional" with her
amorous spouse. It's more nettling, as in the scene previous, Alma, in Mirren's Oscar
moment, delivers an impassioned monologue about how, as a woman, she has a
right to have fun and not always be nursing her husband. She's
punished for her stupidity. She's punished, essentially, for not knowing that Psycho
is going to be a substantial hit, and she and this Hitchcock are reduced to
figures mainly interested in the bottom line. To hear Alfred fucking Hitchcock bash Vertigo for its low grosses would have been the moment I checked out if I
hadn't already checked out when Ed Gein became Hitchcock's secret sharer. I mean,
seriously: fuck this movie. More than that, fuck it for the part where Janet Leigh and Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) make "I told you so" eyes after the
filming of Psycho's shower sequence, which not only fails to address the
Saul Bass controversy but also insinuates that that's ol' Hitch in there doing the
thrusting and stabbing, just like Mel Gibson driving them nails into Christ. Hitchcock
is just awful.

It's all dime-store
psychoanalysis, if you'll pardon the pun, wrapped around a genuinely
disturbing attempt to recast Hitchcock as a harmless old guy intent on
saving his marriage on the eve of, of all things, him "discovering"
Tippi Hedren and essentially torturing her through The Birds and Marnie.
Hitchcock scholars will spin themselves into a fine powder spotting everything that's tonally or factually wrong about the piece (the movie implies
that Psycho was shot on the Paramount lot, something that will come as some
surprise to visitors of the Universal Studios tour); others
will avoid it because it looks exactly like the kind of populist,
elder-sploitative happy horseshit that it is. There are jokes about Hitchcock's
weight and alcohol consumption; there's a moment where he praises his
secretary/reader/girl Friday Peggy Robertson (Toni Collette) and she almost
cries for his tenderness; and, for God's sake, there's a suggestion that Hitch had a
spyhole drilled into Vera Miles's dressing room, diminishing Norman Bates's use of the same device's metaphoric value in Psycho as a camera
indicting audience voyeurism while introducing into the ecosystem this vile
oversimplification of Hitchcock's obsessions. I like, too, Breen successor Geoff Shurlock (Kurtwood Smith) declaring that no toilet had
ever been shown in an American film up to that point when, you know, that's not true, either, and Shurlock probably knew it. There's enough "there"
there without having to make shit up, is what I'm saying. And if' you're
keeping score, the bad guys in this picture are people who don't know
that Psycho is PSYCHO!, old ladies wanting to be loved, and
censors.

Then there's the ridiculous Hopkins, never certain whether he wants to be the jovial, mordant television
personality or the pathetic old guy in the raincoat, muttering about and
stuffing his face with tins of imported-meat mush during midnight
gorge-sessions. He's not inhabiting a character, he's collecting a paycheck by
shorthanding the two popular conceptions of Hitch; Hopkins had more life, frankly,
as the papa-wolf in The Wolf Man. Mirren's Alma would have been more
interesting had Hitchcock not beaten her down like some folks
insist Hitchcock himself beat his leading ladies down (irony), and there's a
promising introduction to Tony Perkins (James D'Arcy, bang on) that just becomes the next unbelievably frustrating thing in this piece of shit when
he's immediately marginalized–made into a gay joke, really–and shunted to
the periphery. It has the requisite end card that reveals that Psycho was popular,
but not how popular, or why, or the way it changed everything about how Americans went to the movies. Hitchcock doesn't broach the social change that made
it possible, or the entire range of events and setbacks that
led to its making, or this period in the title subject's life. In truth, Hitchcock is about an old
couple on the verge of decrepitude deciding to make a go of their marriage
because they have no other choice. Yeah, it's awful. And smug besides.
What a shame.

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