Hitchcock: A Focus On Strong Actors

Watching Hitchcock is like watching the movie A Week With Marilyn. Because everybody knows what really happened to these iconic characters in Hollywood, we, as the audience, form our own views as to whether this movie is true to reality or even whether we like it or not as an art form. But you don't have to like or know Alfred Hitchcock to really enjoy this movie. The focus is on the strong actors, from principal to supporting - Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson and Toni Collette.

Hopkins is hardly recognizable with his prosthetic makeup and fat suit, but he still gives a very strong performance. Helen Mirren, as Hitchcock's wife Alma Reville, once again outshines everybody and her performance might earn her another Oscar nomination. Johansson already looks the part with her blonde wig, but I still have to give her credit for playing Janet Leigh, the mother of Jamie Lee Curtis, with such charm and glamor. In those days, movie stars do look like movie stars! On the other hand, why would a talented actor like Toni Collette accept the role of Hichcock's assistant Peggy? Michael Stuhlberg's performance as the big Hollywood talent agent Lew Wasserman is a bit weak, and Andrew Garfield would have been more convincing as Anthony Perkins than James D'Arcy. Jessica Biel never strikes me as a good actor and she even looks tired as Vera Miles in this flick.

The film is not about the director Hitchcock. Its emphasis is on the love story and relationship between the renowned director and his wife Alma. Their relationship came to a crisis when Hitchcock was shooting the movie Psycho. We learned that even a successful box office director had to be at the mercy of the big Hollywood studios and behind the success, his pride, ego, insecurities, jealousy, obsessions with his characters and fantasies for blonde screen sirens almost engulfed him in his own artistic world. Hitchcock's determination to make an unusual movie best demonstrated that the best artists are those who take risks and experiment with new, innovative ideas and approaches no matter how high the stakes are.

Having the character Hitchcock play Prologue and Epilogue to the movie is an interesting approach. But having the real psycho Norman Bates appear throughout the movie does not work as well unless the director Sacha Gervasi wants us to think that Hitchcock himself is a bit of a psycho himself!