Hitchcock tells the story of the making of Psycho, one of Alfred Hitchcock‘s most famous and influential films. Because the film crossed into areas of sexual content and violence not seen in American films previously — heck, it was the first film in which the censors begrudgingly allowed a flushing toilet to be shown — Hitchcock had to film the movie using his own money and his crew from his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It was the biggest financial gamble of his career, and the film Hitchcock, in which the Master of Suspense is remarkably played by Anthony Hopkins, ties the stress associated with that with stress within Hitchcock’s marriage. Hitchcock is generally thought of being infatuated with his beautiful leading ladies, and his wife (and the secret of his filmmaking success because of her invaluable advice) Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) becomes annoyed by his flirting with his Psycho leading lady Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson). However, Alma is carrying on her own flirtatious relationship with screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), which pushes Hitchcock to the point of physical sickness as he begins to suspect Alma is cheating on him. All of this stress threatens to turn the final product of Psycho into a dud.
But beyond Hopkins’ wonderful impersonation of Hitchcock and Helen Mirren turning in yet another wonderful performance as Alma, there really isn’t much to the film. The other actors — including Johansson as Janet Leigh, Jessica Biel as Vera Miles, and James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins — seem to be having lots of fun playing dress-up, but they’re just distractions from the Hitchcock marriage melodrama that dominates the movie. As Alex wrote in his review, the dynamic between Hopkins and Alma is there, but not the rest of the movie.
As such, the title is a misnomer because this movie really isn’t about Hitchcock’s life and work as a whole but is entirely about the production of Psycho, sort of like if Walk the Line was only about Johnny Cash recording his album at San Quentin and left out all the other interesting parts of Cash’s life. While Psycho was probably one of Hitchcock’s more interesting behind-the-scenes experiences because of its financing and low-budget shoot, it’s rather difficult to sum up Hitchcock and his relationship to his wife by just focusing on the production of just one of his fifty-five films. In fact, going into Hitchcock requires knowing quite a bit about not only the director and his persona but pretty much the ins and out of Psycho. In other words, if you’ve never seen Psycho — in fact, if you haven’t seen about four or five Hitchcock films — you’ll be quickly lost. And, if The Girl is to believed (another film about Hitchcock’s relationships with his leading ladies), Hitchcock’s creepiness only got worse while working with Tippi Hedren on his next two films so the ending here seems forced.
It’s surprising that Sacha Gervasi was tapped to direct considering this was his first narrative film (his only other directing credit was the music documentary Anvil!: The Story of Anvil). I liked Anvil! quite a bit — it was probably my favorite documentary of 2008 — and as a whole that movie tells a more interesting story than Hitchcock. In fact, I can’t imagine why one would want to watch Hitchcock unless he or she already ran out of movies to watch by the actual Alfred Hitchcock and also ran out of behind-the-scenes features on the DVDs/Blu-rays. In this case (as in most cases), real life is the more compelling choice.
So while Hitchcock as a whole is a good movie based on the two main performances, it’s far from a great one. If you’d like to see some big name actors pretend to shoot an old fashioned movie, go ahead and see it. But if you want to know more about Alfred Hitchcock the man, read a book or (better yet) see the movies that he actually directed.
Rating: It’s fun to see Hopkins and Mirren as the Hitchcocks, but the rest of the film doesn’t hold up (5/10).
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