Hitchcock

Hitchcock 2012 U.S. (98 minutes) directed by Sacha Gervasi; written by John J. McLaughlin, based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (Dembner Books, New York, 1990).

There must be countless ways a Hollywood movie about a larger-than-life character like legendary director Alfred Hitchcock making one of his classic films could go horribly wrong.

Director Sacha Gervasi and writer John J. McLaughlin’s Hitchcock manages to sidestep them all with flair and good taste, a dash of the legend’s mordant wit as well as his meticulous eye for detail and crisply edited storytelling manner.

Hitchcock provides an imaginative profile of Hitchcock’s marriage and professional partnership with his wife Alma Reville based on the period during which he was making Psycho, one of his most fully realized artistic masterpieces and his most financially successful film.

Psycho (1960) is the story of mother-haunted serial murderer Norman Bates. Bates’ activities come to light after he murders Marion Crane, who disappears after she steals $40,000 from one of her employer’s clients. Marion’s sister Lila Crane and Marion’s boyfriend Sam Loomis hire private detective Milton Arbogast to find her. Arbogast tracks Marion to Norman Bates’ motel where he also disappears. Lila and Sam pick up his trail from there.

The original story, by genre writer Robert Bloch, is based on the Plainfield, Wisconsin serial murderer Ed Gein (whose ‘spirit’ appears to Hitchcock in Gervasi’s movie, played by Michael Wincott). Gein apparently was the model also for the serial killer Jame ‘Buffalo Bill’ Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Hitchcock took this noirish horror genre story and shot it in uncompromising black and white; he made its aberrant sexuality titillating by making his audience complicit voyeurs. He put this revolutionary shocker together with Bernard Herrmann’s classic musical score in such a way that the worst horror and violence, most notably the famous ‘shower scene’ in which Bates’ ‘mother’ savagely stabs the naked Marion to death, takes place in the viewer’s imagination.  

The director personally financed the project when appalled Paramount studio head Barney Balaban refused, and then he fought with Geoffrey Shurlock, administrator of the Motion Picture Production Code, the Hollywood self-censorship board, to clear the finished film for release.

What a daunting challenge this biopic must have presented for an actor! Just being Alfred Hitchcock was a full-time job. Apart from his status as one of cinemas great auteurs, his larger than life-sized personality and all the shopworn anecdotes and pop psychoanalyzing, his instantly recognizable image and profile made this a hard-sell for us going in.

But we were pleasantly surprised. Unlike his campy Richard Nixon for Oliver Stone, Anthony Hopkins had us hooked once we got past quibbles that he does not resemble the Master and tuned into the story about a famous and successful artist hemmed in by advancing age and poor health and others’ professional expectations of him, and about his wife, a gifted and formidable behind-the-scenes presence. Pairing Hopkins's Alfred with Helen Mirren’s Alma was a stroke of inspiration.

Helen Mirren as Alma Reville and Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock editing Psycho in Hitchcock.

In addition to the making of Psycho, we see the portrait of a marriage of a couple who has been working together professionally since the mid-1920s. Gervasi and McLaughlin give Alma the full credit Hitchcock never failed to give her but that the public seldom saw. They also show the controlling Hitchcock’s jealous resentment of Alma working independently to help fictional screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston) develop a marketable script.

One wonders how the ‘controlling Hitchcock’ himself would have made such a story convincing. How about hiring two senior stars of great ability and charisma and encouraging the second lead to steal the picture from the first?

Gervasi and McLaughlin frame their story within the format of the popular Alfred Hitchcock Hour television series which was current during the making of Psycho. These delicious, hour-long tales of the macabre opened by pairing a taste of the drama to follow with one of Hitchcock’s ironical comments and closed in a similarly amusing, irreverent vein. In this instance, at the end, a raven lands on Hitchcock’s shoulder foreshadowing his next project, The Birds.  

In a sense, what Gervasi and McLaughlin have accomplished is a kind of narrative jujitsu, by taking Rebello’s factual potboiler, Hitchcock-style, and practicing their company’s technical and artistic strengths to show Hitchcock and his company at work rather than to try to ‘give’ us Hitchcock. The rest of their casting is of the same order as the two leads.

In Psycho, Janet Leigh played Marion Crane, with Vera Miles as her sister Lila and John Gavin as Loomis. Anthony Perkins was Norman Bates.

Janet Leigh, inset, and Scarlett Johansson as Leigh playing Marion Crane in Hitchcock.

Scarlett Johansson makes a terrific Leigh and Jessica Biel makes as good a Miles because what we see is Hollywood professionals working as Hollywood professionals, rather than trying to be ‘personalities’ (e.g., Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor). James D’Arcy’s Tony Perkins looks and feels startlingly close to the original.

We also see Hitchcock’s team: his MCA (Music Corporation of America) agent Lew Wasserman (Michael Stuhlberg); Peggy Robertson (Toni Collette), his production assistant and gatekeeper; Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of Psycho (Ralph Macchio); assistant director Hilton Green (Kai Lennox), Saul Bass, Hitchcock’s graphic designer and storyboard artist (Wallace Langham), Bernard Herrmann (Paul Schackman), and film editor George Tomasini (Spencer Garrett), among many others.  

Not least can one imagine Hitchcock and Alma approving Gervasi’s production design and sets (Judy Becker, production designer; Robert Gould, set decorator; and art director Alexander Wei), camerawork (Jeff Cronenweth), and editing (Pamela Martin). The costumes (designed by Julie Weiss), particularly the women’s suits, outfits and lingerie are sublime.

We found this to be a fully satisfying and entertaining hour-and-a-half in the dark with strangers. 

Outrageous fortune

A complicated triangle: Martha Burns, Paul Gross and Stephen Ouimette in Slings & Arrows

Slings & Arrows 2003-6 Canada (three six-episode seasons) directed by Peter Wellington; created and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney, with Tecca Crosby and Sean Reycraft.

This gem of a Canadian workplace comedy/drama television series set amid a fictional theater festival is about miracles.

Shakespeare’s words are the first miracle. The next comes when a motley and diverse collection of actors herded catlike together animate these words to enchant the easily distracted modern ear four centuries later.

The third miracle is the terrific series writing and richness of carefully selected detail which together, like good acting, make the careful thought, discernment, talent and hard work that went into the making seem arbitrary and incidental, that is, natural, as though of real life, and not just the cut and thrust of costumed capering.

In a sense, this is a workplace comedy that makes the most frivolous things serious and handles serious matters with a light, sure touch. Unlike most workplaces, the theater provides the broadest context because it involves men and women of all ages across the whole range of human experience.

At the same time, there is a Canadian thing going on: the word ‘sorry’ seems to be a national institution—or to stand for one.

As in Shakespeare’s dramas, the series includes a disparate collection of kings and queens, princesses and paupers, knights and knaves, rogues, fools, fairies, witches, and ghosts. The cast does as good a job in their roles as contemporary actors as the characters they play find voices for Shakespeare’s classic parts.

Alas! Poor Oliver. Paul Gross in Slings & Arrows: the answer is 'To be.' 

It is exciting to watch Shakespeare’s plays take shape from a director’s vision, and to hear the old words in dog-eared scripts find life anew as they have for hundreds of years.

The setting is the New Burbage Festival, a fictional annual theater festival in a small Ontario town, based loosely on the world-renowned Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario.

The series may be best characterized as a three-tiered wedding cake with three figures on top, ornately decorated with a profusion of subplots and moments.

The three cake tiers are the Shakespeare plays that lead each festival—and series—season: Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.

The figures on top are the story’s three principal roles which form a complicated triangle: Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross), the festival’s brilliant and passionate artistic director; Ellen Fanshawe (Martha Burns), the polymorphously perverse main leading lady (as Titania, Gertrude, Lady Macbeth and Regan); and Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette), their former director and mentor, untimely done in by a truck bearing the slogan ‘Canada’s Best Hams.’

Oliver’s demise early in season one leads to Geoffrey succeeding him as artistic director. Geoffrey must direct Hamlet, the play in which seven years earlier under Oliver’s direction (and in which Ellen played Ophelia), provoked by Oliver’s manipulations, he had a nervous breakdown during a live production, which ended in a long spell of clinical institutionalization.

Chatty ghost Stephen Ouimette with Paul Gross in season one of Slings & Arrows

Like Hamlet, Geoffrey must master his indecision to act to oppose the ‘sea of troubles’ by which he is beset: a lead played by Jack Crew (Luke Kirby), an American action movie star whose agent sent him to the festival for stage seasoning, as capable of the role as he is intimidated by it; an appallingly bad Ophelia played with ‘Vietnam flashbacks’ by Claire Donner (Sabrina Grdevich); and most of all his ‘theatre father’ Oliver’s ever-present, kibitzing ghost. An inspired understudy played by Rachel McAdams and a chameleon turn out to be the silver lining.

Geoffrey also must contend throughout the series with the suits, particularly the festival’s musical-happy executive director Richard Smith-Jones (Mark McKinney, one of the series writers). Anna Conroy (series creator and writer Susan Coyne), Richard’s straight-faced associate administrative director, strains a Canadian stiff upper lip to contain this antic hay.

Susan Coyne and Mark McKinney, writers and stars of Sling & Arrows

One of many lively subplots involves Richard and Holly Day (Jennifer Irwin), an effervescently over-the-top representative of the festival’s new American corporate sponsor from Houston—a classic Canadian take on the neighbors across Niagara Falls.

Season two features Henry Breedlove (Geraint Wyn Davies), a pompous, square-jawed veteran stage actor, as Macbeth, in a power struggle with Geoffrey as his director, complete with echoes of Sergio Leone theme music.

Alongside this battle royal runs Romeo and Juliet, directed by the flamboyantly condescending, beleathered Darren Nichols (Don McKellar) with exuberant affection for Germanic and special effects. Nichols is at pains to contain his Patrick (David Alpay) and Sarah (Joanne Kelly) whose Romeo and Juliet take on lives of their own and burst from the postmodern cages in which he purports disdainfully to mock them.

Joanne Kelly and David Alpay as Juliet and Romeo caged in Slings & Arrows

Watching Patrick and Sarah play Romeo and Juliet’s famous night together (II, ii) from the wings, Ellen, who once played Juliet to Geoffrey’s Romeo, tells Geoffrey that she hates the play.

‘You watch it and you feel miserable because you don’t have that kind of passion in your life. Nobody does. It’s a fantasy. It’s irresponsible,’ Ellen says.

‘You know what I think?’ Geoffrey replies. ‘I think it’s painfully accurate. Two idiots meet, they fall in love; they’re happy briefly; then all hell breaks loose. Happens all the time.’

Meanwhile in a contemporary theatre workshop, two more ‘idiots,’ playwright Lionel Train (Jonathan Crombie) and practical Anna, develop a mad passion.

Paul Gross, William Hutt and Sarah Polley rehearsing King Lear in Slings & Arrows

Season three features elderly stage legend Charles Kingman (the octogenarian Shakespearean actor William Hutt) as King Lear, relentlessly hectoring his Cordelia, Sophie Dunbar (actor, writer and film director Sarah Polley). The counterpoint to Hutt's spellbinding pièce de theatre is a fizzy contemporary Broadway-style musical East Hastings: the Musical that puts a bounce in Richard-the-suit’s middle-aged step.

The series makes delicious mincemeat of theater people, those who make theater no less than their audience and supporters. No sweat there. One of the reasons it works well is the sense that these writers and actors make fun of the theater people they know best: themselves and each other. The parody is entirely within scale. The cast play roles and tell stories larger than life; thus the drama and parody need be larger than life-sized.

We see actors living the same rambling, shambling passionate lives offstage as they play on it. The Shakespeare snippets are done convincingly well—or badly on purpose; the fragments of Hutt’s King Lear are astounding.

The great moments surprise and delight. One comes in the bar where the actors hang out, after the festival cancels King Lear. Cyril (Graham Harley) and Frank (Michael Polley, Sarah’s father), an older gay couple who play perennial roles ‘in the middle of the pack,’ try to console disappointed Sophie that the cancellation is not the end of the world.

‘Oh Sophie, love, don’t fret. You’ve got lots of talent, you’ll have loads of success and a very long career,’ said Cyril.

‘But… at the end of it all, you’ve got to have some spectacular cock-ups,’ Frank said.

‘Because then you’ll have stories,’ Cyril said.

‘And then, you’ve had a life… You’ve had a life,’ Frank said.

The show does indeed go on—and ends with a wedding.