Gervasi: Hitchcock (2013)

Starring Anthony Hopkins in the lead role, Hitchcock revolves around Alfred Hitchcock's personal and professional life during the production of Psycho, especially his relationships with Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johannson) and his wife, Alma (Helen Mirren). Given Hitchcock's canonisation and sedimentation as a director of psychological thrillers, there's something refreshing about the way the film recovers him as not only a director but a pioneer of horror, as well as the way it ascribes his horror impulses to his televisual career as much his film career: according to the film’s logic, Psycho allowed Hitchcock to give himself over to horror because it arrived at the beginning of the decade in which he finally gave himself over to television. Perhaps that’s why Gervasi groups Psycho with Alfred Hitchcock Presents rather than with his cinematic filmography, giving Hitchcock itself something of the flavor of a telemovie, much like the HBO telemovie The Girl, which came out around the same time, and examines the same broad period in Hitch's career. Among other things, that makes it a loving tribute to the prosthetic creakiness of televisual horror – alternately comforting and alarming, just as interested in grotesquerie as in suspense. And Hopkins goes out of his way to make Hitch as grotesque as possible, putting in his most prosthetic, artificial performance since The Silence of the Lambs, until it’s more like attending a waxworks exhibition than watching an actor, part of a pervasive plasticity that makes every face feel made up, balloons every utterance into bloated, baroque excess. This is the Hitchcock of monstrous publicity stills and staged silhouettes, ballooning as the film proceeds, absorbing more and more duties into his directorial role, including writing, editing, calming censors and, finally, funding the project out of his own pocket. At one level, that creates a certain nostalgia for Hitch’s gung-ho, entrepreneurial auteurism, but it also feels like a reflection on the current revival of auteurist television, and how Hitch might have handled it – what the director of Psycho might have done with his own HBO show.