New York Times (05/Dec/1998) - Movies: Psycho (1998)
(c) The New York Times (05/Dec/1998)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins, Bernard Herrmann, Gus Van Sant, Janet Leigh, John Gavin, Joseph Stefano, Psycho (1960), Saul Bass
Movies: Psycho (1998)
Gus Van Sant's new color replica of Psycho opened without advance screenings yesterday, adopting Alfred Hitchcock's policy of dodging reviews but neglecting some of his other, even better marketing ideas. There was a time when no one could enter a theater playing Psycho after the film had started. Today's audiences can traipse freely, and at the theater I attended somebody even made a loud cellular phone call just as the rest of us were bracing ourselves for the shower scene. Anyway, the film's main suspense revolved around a single question: now that room rent at the Bates Motel is up to $36.50, what else is new?
It turns out the apparent rocks in Mr. Van Sant's head are mere pebbles. If he isn't Hitchcock, neither is he crazy. His film is an artful, good-looking remake (a modest term, but it beats plagiarism) that shrewdly revitalizes the aspects of the real Psycho (1960) that it follows most faithfully but seldom diverges seriously or successfully from one of the cinema's most brilliant blueprints. Those of us not quite ready to write off the first film will gain little from learning that Norman keeps porn magazines and toy soldiers in his once off-limits childhood bedroom.
If the filmmaker is right in supposing that Psycho is most widely remembered as that scary shower movie, here's a brief reminder. A secretary named Marion Crane (originally Janet Leigh) has a lover who won't marry her for financial reasons. So she absconds with a pile of cash that has literally landed in her lap. Eager to hide, Marion checks into a remote motel and winds up having a powerfully disturbing effect on the proprietor. Then he has an even more disturbing effect on her. Three other characters (Marion's sister, lover and a private detective) begin investigating Marion's disappearance. Norman, an amateur taxidermist, has one scary mom watching all this from her perch atop a hill.
The new Psycho begins promisingly with bold green added to the Saul Bass title sequence, a fuller sound to Bernard Herrmann's unforgettable theme music (re-recorded by Danny Elfman) and Anne Heche refreshingly cast in Marion's role. Ms. Heche, along with Julianne Moore as her no-nonsense sister and William H. Macy as the detective, is one of the players here who speak Joseph Stefano's dialogue as if it were brand-new and who successfully recreate their characters in present-day terms. (Why? Ms. Heche asks irritably, when a policeman asks to see her license and registration.)
This Marion is almost as demure as Ms. Leigh's, yet she's also more headstrong and flirty. Aided this time by witty costume and production design, she now sports orange underwear (in the opening hotel scene), an orange paper parasol (at the car lot) and orange nail polish to match her orange blood in the shower scene that Mr. Van Sant has modified only slightly and ineffectually. Shots of roiling clouds are now interjected into this famous sequence, and the stab marks show up more.
If this Psycho makes the most of its Marion, the same can't be said of its Norman Bates. The absence of anything like Anthony Perkins's sensational performance with that vitally birdlike presence and sneaky way with a double-entendre (A boy's best friend is his mother) is the new film's greatest weakness.
While Vince Vaughn gives the role its share of creepiness, his beefy presence and mechanical recitations also throw off the material's exquisite balance. (The intriguing physical resemblances between the story's matched pairs of characters have been eradicated.) And another of Mr. Van Sant's new ideas, having Norman masturbate just before he kills Marion, would seem to dispel the very tension that matters most to the story.
Beyond having weakened two principal male characters (Viggo Mortensen seems equally miscast as Marion's love, John Gavin's old role, though he does seem more likely to be spending his life in a hardware store) and greatly bolstered the women, Mr. Van Sant adds extra ambient sound and a few more insect actors. (Fly and spider wranglers get screen credit this time.)
However interesting these modifications are, they won't make Psycho any more Scream-like for viewers who like fast, easy fright.
It remains the most structurally elegant and sneakily playful of thrillers. At least some things never change.
