Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Hitchcock

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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)

  • Finding Vivian Maier

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Maloof and Charlie Siskel (2013)

    She ended her life a ‘dumpster diver’ in the Chicago suburb where she lived but Vivian Maier has become, posthumously, an internationally renowned photographer.  I knew that her work had been discovered only recently; and that these recent events and Maier’s life story were thought interesting enough for John Maloof and Charlie Siskel to make this documentary.  I didn’t know how big a name she’d become in the photography world – and I think Maloof and Siskel’s film was a stronger experience for me as a result of this ignorance.   Finding Vivian Maier is fascinating, the first half entirely and especially so.  In 2007, Maloof, aged only twenty-six but a veteran of auctions (since childhood), bought a collection of prints and negatives at an auction house sale, hoping they might include something useful for a book about Portage Park in Chicago on which he was working.   The lot included some 30,000 pictures, in print or negative form.  When Maloof googled the name of the photographer, Vivian Maier, he drew a blank – and continued to do so until he discovered an obituary notice in the Chicago Tribune shortly after her death, at the age of eighty-three, in April 2009.  Maloof is an agreeable scene-setter and narrative companion; his growing obsession with Maier is absorbing too but not nearly so absorbing as the statistics of what he eventually acquired.  The lot originally bought proved to be the tip of an iceberg.  Maloof’s eventual haul[1] comprised close to 150,000 negatives, more than 3,000 prints, hundreds of rolls of film, home movies, and audio tape interviews that Vivian conducted, asking supermarket shoppers what they thought of big political issues of the day, and so on.

    Vivian Maier, who spent most of her working life as a nanny and housekeeper, was an inveterate and seemingly indiscriminate hoarder.  Inside the suitcases and trunk she left behind were, along with her prodigious photographic input, numerous travel tickets (for journeys both local and international – she visited many countries in her youth), multifarious receipts, all sorts of bric-à-brac.  And newspapers:  one of her ex-employers, interviewed by Maloof and Siskel, describes how the mountains of these not only occupied every inch of space in Maier’s living quarters but also encroached on other parts of the family home.   The film-makers’ selection of newspaper headlines suggests that Vivian had a particular interest in sensational and violent crimes.   But, from the start, the drop-in-the-ocean examples of her street photography tell a different, larger story.   The talking heads in Finding Vivian Maier also include two eminent photographers, Joel Meyerowitz and Mary Ellen Mark, who commend Maier’s eye for eccentricity and tragedy, and the compassionate quality present in much of her work.  Meyerowitz helpfully explains that the Rolleiflex camera Maier favoured was ideal for covert photography on the streets of Chicago (and, earlier in her life, New York):  the Rolleiflex user shoots ‘upwards’ rather than at the level of what’s being photographed.   While a good many of her subjects were therefore caught on camera unawares, it’s clear from the startled or hostile expressions of some that they realised just too late what Maier was doing.  Two middle-aged women, one of her former charges and the latter’s girlhood friend, describe how embarrassed they were by Maier’s inevitable camera, how they sometimes wanted to ‘hit her over the head with it’.  And Meyerowitz himself, in one of his later comments, talks admiringly of Maier’s intuitive understanding of how much she could encroach on the space of the person she was photographing – of what she captures on camera representing an intersection between the subject’s vitality and her own.

    Vivian Maier was a highly secretive person.  She used many (it seems mostly unimaginative) pseudonyms.  Yet she didn’t hide herself entirely:  she’s present in a good number of her photographs; she appears in some of the home movie footage; her voice is heard in audio recordings.  Although it’s no surprise that she didn’t show her photographs to anyone, she didn’t either, unless I missed it, actually refuse to do so.  If that’s right, it suggests that those among her employers who knew about Maier’s camera were not interested enough to ask to see the nanny’s snaps.   Those in the cinema audience will be more curious:  you naturally want, like John Maloof, to know more about her personal history and, especially, her earlier life.   There’s disagreement among the contributors as to whether her ‘French accent’ was genuine or an affectation or part of a carefully constructed identity, although the cadence of her English-speaking voice, as well as her name, sounded more German than French to me.  It transpires that Vivian’s father was Austrian but that she, a native New Yorker, spent time during childhood and adult life in the Alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur, her French mother’s family home, and took some remarkable photographs of the people there, including relatives.  An archivist in the New York records department tells of the evidence he’s found that Vivian, who never married, was far from the only member of her family who came to lead a solitary existence.  There are also anecdotes that suggest that she had a pathological aversion from men and inferences are drawn that she may have suffered sexual abuse in her younger life.  One of the girls in her charge (the same one who wanted to hit her over the head with the camera) claims she was physically abused by the nanny.  (This may be true although, if so, it prompts the question of how the girl’s parents didn’t notice the bruises that must have resulted from the treatment that’s described.)  Others nannied by Vivian were evidently and lastingly grateful to her.  It was the sons of a family she’d worked for in the early 1960s who, in her impoverished old age four decades later, set her up in an apartment in the Rogers Park area of Chicago and paid the bills.

    While these biographical facts are of real interest, they somehow detract from the mystery of Vivian Maier that’s created through the story of how John Maloof came by her work, the fact that the people she worked for knew so little about her, and the work itself.  The implication that keeping material evidence of everything that her life contained was a compensation for its emotional isolation and the meagreness of her personal relationships is a familiar one (albeit that the assemblage of material is visually expressive and emotionally powerful).  You sense too that Siskel and Maloof had, by the time they came to make this film, moved beyond the latter’s intense curiosity about the facts of Maier’s life.  (For example, although you’re told the circumstances in which she parted company with a couple of the families for whom she worked, there’s not enough information to discern a consistent pattern.)  The film-makers’ understandable instinct is to return repeatedly to the photographs; whenever they do, your fascination with both the creator of these images and her camera subjects is immediately renewed.

    Vivian Maier has, within the first few minutes of the film, come to epitomise an unsuspected life and talent.  She may well have had, as is claimed, a particular affinity with people who were poor, or otherwise marginalised, but her subjects are varied in terms of age, ethnicity and social standing.  As John Maloof has said, ‘Elderly folk congregating in Chicago’s Old Polish Downtown, garishly dressed dowagers, and the urban African-American experience were all fair game for Maier’s lens’.  But none of those she photographed was well known and, without Maier, they would have disappeared without trace except from the memories of those who knew them (many of whom will now be dead).  The photographer and the people in her photographs together form a kind of community of secret lives; yet the fact that plenty of them didn’t know they were being photographed creates a fine tension.  One interviewee recalls an occasion when Maier, explaining to him her reluctance to use her real name, described herself as ‘a kind of spy’.   He goes on to say that he thought the last person to use such a pretext would be a real spy but Maier’s self-description seems right to me.  She’s elusive in another way too:  her face, which I don’t think I’d seen before, always looked oddly familiar but if I tried to work out who exactly she reminded me of, I never could (although several names came to mind: Frances de la Tour, Allison Janney, Virginia Woolf …)

    A now elderly shopkeeper, who describes what a pain Vivian was as a customer (ordering bits and bobs but refusing to supply contact details so she could never be informed when her order had arrived), expresses frustration that Maier’s photographs don’t tell you more about her.  This woman is a vivid interviewee but I disagree with what she says.  In a snatch of audio recording, Vivian, asked why she won’t say who she is, replies, ‘I’m the mystery woman’, and a child’s giggle is then heard.  The combination of those words and that giggle provides a perfect summary of how Vivian Maier lived her life.  From among those who knew her, there’s plenty of speculation and considerable difference of opinion as to what she would have thought about being discovered.  On the evidence of Finding Vivian Maier, I think I’m with one of her former charges who reckons she’d have been both gratified that her work has been seen by so many and relieved that this didn’t happen during her lifetime – that she didn’t have to cope with the emotional strain of public exposure.

    19 June 2014

    [1] According to Wikipedia, the Maloof Collection isn’t the whole story either:  ‘In the spring of 2010, Chicago art collector Jeffrey Goldstein acquired a portion of the Maier collection from one of the original buyers. Since Goldstein’s original purchase, his collection has grown to include 17,500 negatives, 2,000 prints, 30 homemade movies, and numerous slides.’

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