Daily Archives: Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Sacha Gervasi (2012)

In the autumn of 2005, Bennett Miller’s Capote was released to critical acclaim – especially for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance in the title role.  At the time, Douglas McGrath was making Infamous, which covered virtually the same territory as the Miller film, with Toby Jones as Truman Capote.  When Infamous appeared in the second half of 2006, Jones received a lot of praise but by then Hoffman had won an Oscar and many other prizes for his Capote.  The Girl, about Alfred Hitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren and starring Toby Jones, was shown on HBO in late October 2012 (and on BBC on Boxing Day).  Within the month, Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock, with Anthony Hopkins in the lead, was in American cinemas and it has now arrived in British ones.  It isn’t Capote all over again.  Gervasi’s film is about the making of Psycho, not The Birds and Marnie, and Hopkins isn’t going to win an Academy Award.  Even so, Toby Jones could be forgiven for reflecting on how much his physical extraordinariness limits the screen parts he gets, and for wondering how often he‘s going to be cast in roles for which the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Anthony Hopkins are physically better suited.

Gwyneth Hughes’s screenplay for The Girl is based on Donald Spoto’s 2009 book Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies.   If it’s anything like an accurate account of Hitchcock’s treatment of Tippi Hedren (this is much disputed), The Girl is almost bound to make you feel sympathy for Hedren and watch her in The Birds and Marnie in a different light.   I’m not sure it’s true that her refusal to be controlled by Hitchcock – including resisting his sexual advances – effectively stunted her career.  Hedren wasn’t much of an actress and would probably not have had a career as one if Hitchcock hadn’t liked the look of her.   But if Hitchcock subjected Hedren to what Julian Jarrold and Gwyneth Hughes show it’s not surprising that her look in The Birds is increasingly glazed and stunned.  I’m prepared to believe Hitchcock was a sexual pest and manipulator.  This isn’t for a censorious thrill and, if it’s true, I don’t think it diminishes him as an artist – except that perhaps it further coarsens his blatant use of blondes in his movies.  But the tendency of many film-makers and cinéastes to see a genius auteur as above the law (evidenced  in reactions to Roman Polanski’s house arrest in Switzerland in 2009) tends to bring out the reactionary in me in matters of this kind.

Toby Jones’s portrait of Hitchcock is brilliant.  You soon forget that this is an actor doing an impression, even as you keep hearing distinctly the Leytonstone vowels.  The thick, curdled voice and the excess weight (though Jones doesn’t look quite heavy enough) function as layers of protection and expressions of self-disgust.  Quite early on in The Girl, Hitchcock tells someone it’s a well-known fact that he has no sense of humour.  You assume he’s being ironic but one of the fascinating things about Toby Jones’s performance is that he distinguishes wit, which his Hitchcock has in abundance, from humour.  (You’re aware of this especially in his delivery of the filthy limericks that Hitchcock is partial to.)  Sienna Miller is very effective as Tippi Hedren: you can see what Hitchcock sees in her, and Miller is able to make Hedren more expressive ‘off screen’ than on camera.  Imelda Staunton as Alma Reville and Penelope Wilton as Hitchcock’s secretary Peggy Robertson are both excellent.  They function as a very singular double act:  two women who know the rules of the game, who admire Hitchcock and are his helpmates, and who realise the humiliating aspect of complete loyalty.  Julian Jarrold has an impressive track record in TV drama – Great Expectations in 1999, the best of the Red Riding films, Appropriate Adult in 2011.  His direction here is taut and Gwyneth Hughes’s script (she also adapted The Mystery of Edwin Drood for television) is intelligent and well organised.  The Girl was absorbing television, thanks both to its subject and the way it was done.  Its limitation, eventually a serious one, was that it didn’t develop beyond its first hour:  the last thirty minutes were anti-climactic as drama – they merely reiterated points that had already been fully made.

The Girl may present a narrow point of view but its sharp single-mindedness makes it far superior to the tame, inert Hitchcock.  John McLaughlin (who co-wrote the ridiculous Black Swan) based his screenplay on a 1990 book by Stephen Rebello called Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.  The story could make a fine documentary but McLaughlin and Sacha Gervasi are unsure whether their subject is the story of Psycho or the story of Hitchcock’s marriage, and the result isn’t interesting in either department.  Gervasi never finds a secure tone:  until the last few minutes, when Psycho opens in cinemas, Hitchcock is treading water.  Alma’s friendship with the screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train) doesn’t amount to anything; given how dull Danny Huston makes him, it’s baffling that even the notoriously possessive Hitchcock should be worried his wife may be having an affair with ‘Whit’.   There’s scope for a lively lampoon of Hollywood attitudes here but no consistency even in the presentation of the film industry people:  the Paramount boss Barney Balaban (Richard Portnow) is a cartoon; Hitchcock’s agent (Michael Stuhlbarg) and the censor (Kurtwood Smith) are colourless.

The crudeness of the characters McLaughlin has written makes you wonder if the material might have been better played for comedy; the lack of wit in the lines makes you think again.  I laughed twice:  first, at a bit I’d seen several times in the trailer for Hitchcock, when Helen Mirren as Alma advises her husband to kill off Marion Crane after thirty minutes rather than halfway through and crunches decisively on a piece of toast to underline the point; then, near the end, when Hitchcock tells Alma she means more to him than all his screen blondes, she says she’s been waiting thirty years to hear him say that, and he replies, ‘That’s why they call me the Master of Suspense’.   The audience reactions to the shower scene at the first screening of Psycho, and Hitchcock’s waiting at the back of the theatre for the screams, are mildly amusing, if obviously staged.  But when Peggy Robertson watches the film and says, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever take a shower again’, McLaughlin seems to be recycling jokes about Psycho that everyone already knows.  The brief early sequence in which Ed Gein, the Wisconsin serial killer who provided Robert Bloch with the inspiration for Norman Bates, whacks his brother with a spade, supplies the movie’s only startling moment.  Hitchcock’s imagined conversations with Gein are unimaginative and mechanical – they play as if the film-makers had showing Hitchcock’s dark, haunted imagination as something written down on a ‘to do’ list.

Anthony Hopkins does a creditable job as Hitchcock but he’s wrong for the part.  With prosthetic, padding (which isn’t very good) and a lot of skill, Hopkins pretends to have a comical appearance but his natural air of distinction keeps emerging:  no one would laugh at how Anthony Hopkins looks the way they might laugh at the real Hitchcock (or Toby Jones).   Hitchcock surely exploited and emphasised his unprepossessing face and body – made himself appear almost despicably innocuous and an unlikely purveyor of fear.  (There’s a kinship here with the stereotypically harmless-looking but lethal husband of mid-twentieth century English suburban murders in fact and fiction.)   Occasionally we’re meant to see the vulnerable side of Hitchcock and Hopkins gets these moments across with ease.  Elsewhere, he often seems like a waxwork and his painstaking impersonation tends to slow things up – not that the film was zipping along anyway.  Watching Hopkins and Helen Mirren as Alma Reville is a reminder of an actor’s relative freedom if the real-life person they’re playing isn’t well known to the viewer.  That freedom – from audience expectation and prosthetic – allows Mirren to suggest a human being but her innate authority throws the story out of balance.   She suggests a naturally glamorous woman past her youth, whose admiration for her husband as an artist is in conflict with her distress at his infidelity to her in everything but the actual sexual deed.  Alma Reville never was a beauty; you can believe that, whatever she felt about dutifully following her famous husband around in public, she would have been able to do so unobtrusively.  With Helen Mirren in the role, you don’t believe that Alma would have been so loyally tolerant – or that the press wouldn’t have been photographing her.

The actors playing actors in Hitchcock appear to have been asked by Sacha Gervasi to mimic the characterisations in Psycho.  Scarlet Johansson does well enough as the centred Janet Leigh/Marion Crane but James D’Arcy’s Anthony Perkins is hopeless – an impression of a dim version of Norman Bates.  It’s easier for Jessica Biel as Vera Miles since Lila Crane is hardly a memorable character; because of Hitchcock’s treatment of Miles, this element of Gervasi’s film, although nothing special, is relatively realised (as well as closer than any other element to the theme of The Girl).  Toni Collette is striking as Peggy Robertson but both her presence and her acting seem too sophisticated for the character (or the one she’s been given to play, at any rate).

Whereas The Girl is unkind to Hitchcock, this cinema film wants to play safe with his reputation:  Sacha Gervasi presents Hitch as ‘a character’ (in the euphemistic sense of the word) and him and Alma, in the bland finale, as a-nice-happy-couple-really.  Legends at the end remind us that Hitchcock famously never won an Oscar.  Although he didn’t win a competitive Oscar, he was given an honorary award in 1968:  since the legend goes on to report that he received the AFI Life Achievement Award, it seems odd not to mention the Academy’s honour more than a decade earlier.  One of the few genuinely mysterious moments in the film occurs when Hitchcock is reading a newspaper with the headline ‘The King Speaks to Every Briton’, eight years after the accession of Queen Elizabeth II.   Perhaps you would need the Master of Suspense to make this story a surprising one in terms of how things turn out but Hitchcock makes its protagonist seem rather innocuous and Psycho a bit boring.  This is quite a feat.

27 December 2012 (The Girl), 9 February 2013 (Hitchcock)