Starring: Sir Anthony Hopkins, Dame Helen Mirren,Scarlett Johansson,Toni Collette
Director: Sacha Gervasi
Running time: 98 minutes
Released by: Fox Searchlight
Out: 8th February
Film director Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) is looking for a film that will excite him. He has a strong, if difficult reputation, one that often puts him in opposition to the studios for whom he works - providing some major hits but also running up the bills. So when he settles on a adaptation of Robert Bloch's novel Psycho, it will not be a smooth adventure. Few see it as a viable project and certainly not one that audiences will expect. The voluminous auteur disagrees and is willing to put everything on the line. His wife Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) is her own subtle powerhouse, never needing the spotlight, but willing to support her husband's endeavours as well as stand-up to him as needed. Soon the question is not whether Psycho will even get finished, but whether this latest project will test their friendship, marriage and trust to breaking point.
There's a real problem with doing ANY sort of biopic with how much you say, how much you don't and how much you merely surmise. Even in the most compelling stories there will be a need to compact, prioritise and form a structure into which an audience will be drawn. So, in many ways, all films (perhaps even documentaries as well), are - in part - works of fiction or a sequence of overly selective truths.
Hitchcock isn't, by any means, an impartial look at the famous film director. It is, to use that oft-offered multi-purpose phrase ' a dramatisation' of real events, offering its take, reasoning and slant on a key period in his life . From the opening moments, where Hitchcock himself addresses the audience, this feels like a story that the director would tell if he was reluctantly strong-armed to pen it himself. It doesn't, in any way, paint him as an angel - often he's clearly his own worst enemy and the victim of his own paranoia (both personally and professionally) - but the eventual feel of the piece is a troubled man, weak to his own vices and happy to manipulate those around him in the name of art, but ultimately a gruff, driven man with an undercurrent of decency. We see a misunderstood peccadillo'd genius and his underestimated wife rather than a lecherous bully and would-be philanderer with his overly-patient spouse.
To that end, while the drama itself is perfectly watchable as a story about relationships and populated by a strong cast, there's a consistent feeling of it being synpathetic fiction. Hopkins, smothered in prosthetics, gives a performance in which he's playing Hitchcock, not being Hitchcock. Mirren fares better, bringing her unique air of impatient authority to Alma - but this is also helped by the very fact that most people will not have a clear picture of her before seeing the film, really there's no comparison available. Scarlett Johansson is fine as his star Janet Leigh - trying to get ready for the infamous bloody shower scene at the Bates Motel - but limited by the script, which is also a problem for Jessica Biel as Vera Miles.
It's interesting to see the battle to get Psycho made - modern audiences likely to be unaware that Hitchcock risked going bankrupt in his efforts to get the film made by a studio that was worried his star was on the wane and that the horror/thriller subject-matter wouldn't be suitable for big financial success. Again, Hitchcock is the under-dog we're told to cheer for at the same time as we're supposed to be frustrated by his acidic bark.
A decent, inoffensive mainstream film, with some inventive scenes and funny moments but one that comes out in the wake of the far superior and more biting HBO film 'The Girl' (with Toby Jones in the Hitchcock role, Imelda Staunton as Alma and Sienna Miller as a harassed Tippi Hedren), it will be interesting to see the impact the film has at the box-office. One suspects, despite the cinematic cast, it may attract an older and more niche audience familiar with cinematic history but may resonate less with younger demographic or those, ironically, seeking something like Hitchcock's own work rather than this behind-the-scenes social drama. .
7/10
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