Hitchcock

Hitchcock

Silence of the Hams?

It’s 1959 and, fascinated by the case of serial killer and necrophile Ed Gein (Michael Wincott), legendary director Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) decides his next project will be an adaptation of the lurid horror novel Psycho, loosely inspired by Gein’s crimes.  The only problem is no one in Hollywood will touch the project and Hitch is forced to re-mortgage his house in order to finance the film himself.

As Hitch begins work on the film, his greatest collaborator is his wife Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) who advises him on every aspect of the movie, helping him whip the script into shape and suggesting casting choices.  As production progresses and control freak Hitch becomes increasingly enamored by his leading ladies Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) and Vera Miles (Jessica Biel), Alma loses patience with Hitch’s wandering eye and obsessive nature.  Flattered by the attentions of ambitious, younger screenwriter Whit (Danny Huston), Alma agrees to help him adapt his book into a screenplay.  Convinced Alma is having an affair and wracked with jealousy, Hitch finds fantasies of Gein invading his reality as he creates his masterpiece. 

Five decades after the release of Psycho, British director Sacha Gervasi’s playful, mischievous comedy/drama Hitchcock charts the film’s troubled production, using it as a framework to examine Hitch’s obsessive behaviour and the relationship between him and his wife Alma.  Since his death in 1980 and the gossipy, mostly unfounded, revelations of Tippi Hedren, Hitchcock’s reputation as a cinematic genius has been slightly tarnished; he’s been recast as a monster, a misogynistic control freak, utterly obsessed with his blonde leading ladies.  Gervasi’s film doesn’t exactly redress this balance but his Hitch is far more benign than that of the recent BBC/HBO movie The Girl; a lecherous but ultimately harmless voyeur rather than the attempted rapist of Hedren’s accusations and Hopkins plays him more as a naughty schoolboy than as the predatory oddball we’re so used to.

It’s a popular truism that behind every great man lies a woman.  Gervasi gives us two.  Behind Hitch lies Alma, the wife who gave him his break in the movie business and was his closest (often uncredited) collaborator and source of strength for fifty years.  But in the background, casting a shadow over the film and haunting Hitch’s dreams, lurks Ed Gein and the mouldering corpse of his mother, Gein’s homicidal Mama’s Boy acting as confidant and sly instigator.

A talented screenwriter in her own right, Alma’s career took second place to that of her husband and in a low-key feminist redress, Hitchcock is shown to not only be in the thrall of women but completely unable to function without them.  As much as it is a behind-the-scenes telling of the making of perhaps his greatest work, first and foremost, Hitchcock is a portrait of a marriage.  Hitch’s life is marshalled by Alma, without her he is lost, and there’s real pathos to the scenes where Hitch believes Alma is having an affair. 

As Hitchcock, Hopkins is having real fun in a broad, comic performance that’s more Silence Of The Hams than Silence Of The Lambs, equal parts Hannibal Lecter and belligerent child as the creative genius riddled with insecurities, while Helen Mirren is poised and charming as Alma.  The two share an easy, affectionate intimacy, utterly convincing as a couple weathering the late storms of a marriage.  The pair are ably supported by a talented cast with Scarlett Johansson and James D’Arcy rendering passable impersonations of Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins while Danny Huston is on suitably oily, lupine form as Alma’s admirer.  I

n the film’s fantasy sequences Michael Wincott makes a fascinating, terrifying Gein, a pathetic monster driven as much as Hitchcock by his loneliness and inadequacies, a dark psychic shadow of the great man.  Most surprising however is Jessica Biel who, after an undistinguished career of bland pretty girls finally gets the chance to show her mettle in the relatively minor role of actress Vera Miles, a former object of Hitch’s twisted affections, bitter, frustrated and wounded by Hitch’s treatment after she “betrayed” him by choosing her own path.

It could be argued that if you want to know about Hitchcock, you’d be better off watching his films but Hitchcock, with its impish sense of humour and a wonderfully puckish performance by Anthony Hopkins, is a light, breezy piece of entertainment that’s the perfect antidote to the po-faced awards contenders currently cluttering up our multiplexes.   

David Watson

Directed by:

Sacha Gervasi

Written by:

John J. McLaughlin and Stephen Rebello

Produced by:

Alan Barnette, Joe Medjuck, Tom Pollock, Ivan Reitman and Tom Thayer

Starring:

Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Biel, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, Helen Mirren, Michael Wincott, Ralph Macchio, James D'Arcy, Danny Huston and Toni Collette

Genres:

Biography, Comedy, Drama

Language:

English

Runtime:

1 hour 38 minutes

Certificate:

12a

Rating:

4/5

UK Cinema Release Date:

Friday 8^th February