E-MAIL THE AUTHOR | ARCHIVES
STRANGE IMPERSONATION
By Kim Morgan
January 19, 2005
Last year was the year of the remake. There were the classic remakes—THE LADYKILLERS, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, ALFIE and DAWN OF THE DEAD. And there were the more modern remakes—SHALL WE DANCE and THE GRUDGE. Aside from DAWN OF THE DEAD, none of the films particularly impressed, giving movie buffs even more reasons to ask: why mess with a good thing?
So what has 2005 up and done? It’s brought in yet another remake, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13—a film that could have been a tight, mean little blast of violence but fell short of its potential.
But ASSAULT had me thinking again of another film that was, perhaps, one of cinema’s most controversial copycats, Gus Van Sant’s 1998 PSYCHO. A film that Van Sant seemed to make as a middle finger to the studios—I can make any film after GOOD WILL HUNTING? OK, I’ll re-make PSYCHO—Van Sant created one of his most daring experimental films, before GERRY and his virtuoso ELEPHANT.
 |
So, it seems almost more fitting today that Van Sant fiddled with Alfred Hitchcock's perfect experiment. A masterwork of modern filmmaking, black humor and transgressive art, PSYCHO is still one of the most influential, disturbing and overanalyzed films of all time. Though considered tame by today's standards, Hitchcock's picture was shocking in its time. Not only did it break convention by killing off its star character midway through the film, PSYCHO showed filmgoers more violence, sexual tension and perversion than they had ever seen in a mainstream picture. For those who had never watched Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM, or the films of Kenneth Anger, PSYCHO was a mind-altering event of mass emotion—a film that aroused viewers through what Hitchcock called "pure film."
Though he always thought of his audience first, Hitchcock also intended PSYCHO to stimulate filmmakers. He asserted to director and Hitchcock scholar François Truffaut: " PSYCHO, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to filmmakers, to you and me." Would Hitchcock have included director Gus Van Sant in the esteemed company of Truffaut? Though purists shake their heads in disbelief, the answer is yes, of course he would.
 |
A consummate showman, Hitchcock would be, most likely, amused by Van Sant's remake of PSYCHO, an undertaking that many deemed unthinkable. But think again about Hitchcock's film. It was such a technical triumph that it begged imitation. So why shouldn't Van Sant go all the way?
Like Hitchcock, Van Sant has shrewdly attempted an experiment of technical trickery in the repackaging of PSYCHO for the '90s audience stumbling into the theater. Toying with viewers' notions of modern and classical filmmaking, Van Sant, like Hitchcock before him, ran the risk of offending an older audience schooled in the idea that certain things are untouchable. Van Sant's attempt at PSYCHO was viewed by some as vulgar. But, to me, this made nay-saying cinephiles seem as stuffy as the 1960 film-goers who were mortally offended by the infidelity, transvestitism, and Oedipal perversion in the original PSYCHO.
From the Saul Bass opening-credit sequence to the Norman Bates close-up ending, Van Sant replicated Hitchcock's PSYCHO almost exactly—scene by scene, and the story is the same. A woman named Marion (Anne Heche in Janet Leigh's role) runs out of town with a bunch of stolen money. During a storm she stops at a creepy motel, where she is murdered by the hotel's weird proprietor, Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn in Anthony Perkins' role). A detective (William H. Macy in Martin Balsam's role) is hired to look for her, while Marion's married lover, Sam (Viggo Mortensen in John Gavin's role), and her sister, Lila (Julianne Moore in Vera Miles' role), anxiously wait for his call. When the detective disappears, the sister and the lover set out to find Marion themselves, only to discover that Norman Bates keeps his dead mother preserved in the basement, and that Marion is also dead.
So does the film work? Yes and no. It does work because by replicating the brilliant original film shot by shot, line by line and note by note (music by the fabulous Bernard Herrmann), this movie is better than most of late. That saying, the picture fails through the passage of time—because it cannot match the original's shocking impact of drains, showers and role reversal. Still, Van Sant's picture is a curious marvel that deserved to be watched as more than just a lark. Though virtually identical, PSYCHO 1998 subtly alters the tone, the psychology and the movie experience.
 |
The most significant changes come from the actors, rather than the modern setting. Heche, who watched Janet Leigh's scenes before every take, duplicates Leigh's Marion down to details as precise as the hand in which she holds her purse and how she moves her hips when she walks. Yet Heche exudes a ditzier quality. Leigh created an impulsive creature, a troubled but ultimately nice woman who was mysterious but down to earth. She had empathy for Norman Bates. Heche's Marion seems simply flirty and slightly dumb. She's bolstered however by her sister Lila—Lila probably had to watch out for Marion all her life. And Moore's Lila (with those Walkman headphones!) is even more pissed off than Miles' version (lesbian, anyone?). She is also appropriately brave, curious and horrified by the Bates household. And Macy in Balsam's role—well, no one can touch Martin Balsam.
 |
The biggest change in the film is the casting of Vaughn as Bates. The Lothario from SWINGERS, who spent most of the '90s miscast in films that didn't allow him to flex his genius comic ability, Vaughn gives us a twist. Perkins played Bates as meek, effete and shy, but Vaughn is boorish, masculine and intelligently evil. Vaughn’s Bates is like the school bully who pulls wings off insects and shocks girls with sexual threats (which may account for one of the film's major missteps—showing Bates masturbate to Marion, leaving out the sexual ambiguity of the original). Initially, Vaughn may seem too handsome to be such a freak, but as the film rolls on, he becomes grotesque. With his huge forehead, icky laugh and deceptively normal manner, the character actor Vaughn becomes a master fake in the style of Ted Bundy. One never buys for a second that this Bates thinks he is Mother. When he smiles at the camera in his last shot, he seems to be saying "the joke's on you" and we sense that he will, no doubt, escape from the institution.
While Vaughn's portrayal was a wise deviation (it would be hard to follow Perkins' exact footsteps), his is not a sympathetic performance, and the entire film is a cold, shrewd exercise. Part of this coldness is a result of Van Sant's purposeful lack of auteurism, which makes his PSYCHO much less the vanity project many critics accused him of. His version is truly an homage to Hitchcock and a celebration of experimental filmmaking. Modern movies can be still be this beautifully crafted. Best, Van Sant's PSYCHO makes one realize just how timeless, yet modern, Hitchcock's film really was.
And you have to love a remake that is just that—a remake.
Read More Kim Morgan at her blog Sunset Gun and
check out Kim's two latest appearances
on G4/Tech TV's THE SCREEN SAVERS:
Appearance 1 and Appearance 2.
E-MAIL THE AUTHOR |
ARCHIVES
|
