It took a few hours of procrastination and a cup of strong coffee, and my finger may have trembled as I clicked the “play” button, but I did finally watch the trailer of the forthcoming film Hitchcock, about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho in 1959-60. It was nearly as unsettling as I had imagined — and not just because Psycho is a film enormously dear to my heart. On the tiny YouTube screen was one of the most honourable actors of the past few decades — not hamming it up exactly, but imitating away.
A two-minute trailer is limited evidence to base an impression on, but Anthony Hopkins’s performance as Hitchcock looked like mimickry to my eyes, as opposed to the considered acting that involves building a character from the inside out. The attempt to make his features approximate Hitchcock’s — such as the studied downward curving of the lips — made me cringe. In any case there is a touch of contrivance to the casting; one wonders if the motive was a lucrative coup with the equally respected Helen Mirren, who plays Hitchcock’s wife Alma.
In 1992, Robert Downey Jr played Charles Chaplin in the biopic Chaplin, but there was an essential difference in effect. The Chaplin on view in most of that film was not the iconic Little Tramp but the real-life person, whom very few viewers had any direct associations with. Thus, Downey Jr had space to work out his own interpretation of the character. Hitchcock, on the other hand, always appeared in trailers, interviews and TV introductions as “himself”: he performed the same set of mannerisms — standing about stiffly, saying outrageous things in a deadpan fashion — in the same three-piece suit that presumably came attached to his body at birth like Karna’s kavacha. Saddled with such a character — someone who is part of our recent pop-cultural mythology — even a fine actor like Hopkins can be reduced to a pawn. (No wonder that Ranbir Kapoor said in an interview that he wasn’t yet ready to take on the daunting part of Kishore Kumar. Who can blame him?)
Watching Hopkins as Hitch — or Meryl Streep accumulating a series of tics and presenting them as “performance” in her imitation of another imposing real-life person, Margaret Thatcher — one sees a looming malaise. Film history is at a point where we can expect an increasing number of biopics about people who lived recently enough that we have video evidence — and strong memories — of their real selves. And when the idea is to make these biopics as box office-friendly as possible, one can expect broad simplifications in script and portrayal.
With important anniversaries around every corner, there is no getting away from films about the cinematic past. In 2014 the movie world will celebrate 75 years of Gone with the Wind, and personally I’d be astonished if a high-profile project about the making of GWTW has not already germinated in the mind of a screenwriter or producer. (What back-stories! Who could resist the possibilities of the real-life scene — as compelling as anything in GWTW itself — where producer David O Selznick first lays eyes on his Scarlett, Vivien Leigh, her face lit up by the flames from the burning Atlanta set.) Critics complain about excessive meta-referencing in contemporary cinema — that Quentin Tarantino, for instance, only makes movies that are about his love for the movies — but it is possible that 30 or 40 years from now we will have a film about Tarantino’s life: in other words, a movie about a boy who watched lots and lots of movies and then made movies that paid tribute to those movies.
Trailers can be misleading, of course — it’s possible that the complete Hitchcock will reveal a shaded performance, with Hopkins reaching for a poetic truth about the director’s personality. But given that this film is a commercial project meant for easy consumption, it’s unlikely. I will watch it, but I may have my fingers splayed over my face in much the same way that unprepared audiences first experienced Psycho in 1960.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer