The Guardian (08/Jan/1999) - Without a Hitch

(c) The Guardian (08/Jan/1999)

Without a Hitch

Jonathan Romney on Gus Van Sant's revamping of a horror classic

There have been a few changes round the homestead. There's a new neon sign out front, and the poky old fruit cellar has been refurbished as a place where you could get down to some serious taxidermy. They've even replaced the shower curtain in Cabin 1, although it's bound to get torn down again before long. Otherwise, life is much as it always was down at the Bates Motel. In fact, it's uncanny how similar everything is.

A remake of "Psycho" sounds like the most futile gesture imaginable - especially coming from Gus Van Sant, a once nonconformist director who, with "Good Will Hunting", seemed to have capitulated to mainstream values. Two ropey eighties sequels had already shown that Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 original had no need of footnotes. Couldn't Norman Bates and his dear old mouldering Ma be left in peace? But Van Sant proposes something stranger than just a remake - this is Psycho constructed shot by shot (bar a few telling lapses) from Joseph Stefano's original script, even using Bernard Herrmann's original score. This is "Psycho" restaged, as a theatre director would restage Hamlet - the difference being that Van Sant duplicates not just the dialogue, but also the original moves.

The whole idea may sound cynical and pointless. But in view of Van Sant's proven eccentricity, the key word is 'gratuitous', not 'pointless' - this "Psycho" qualifies at the very least as a flamboyantly odd gesture that subverts all Hollywood wisdom about audience expectation. The familiar lines and gestures become newly troubling, like an ancient sinister ritual re-enacted once more - Van Sant's actors seem haunted, as if repeating the actions of ghosts. Conversely, hitherto unnoticed details produce wholly new yields of meaning.

Marion Crane (Anne Heche) still makes off with her boss's money, still checks in chez Bates, and is still dispatched in the shower. Private dick Arbogast (William H Macy) still follows her trail and takes a tumble downstairs. But there are a few deviations to shock purists - strangest of all, Arbogast's death, spiked with two wildly incongruous inserts that evoke a subliminal whiff of David Lynch.

The key technical innovations are a brilliantly textured, nerve-racking sound design, and the conversion from black-and-white into colour, masterminded by Asian-based cinematographer Chris Doyle. It's amazing how much colour alone changes the tenor of the story. Yes, the blood is now red, but that's hardly a shocking sight these days: what becomes newly startling instead is the genteel delicacy of the knife marks. The vibrant wardrobes speak volumes. Where Janet Leigh's bra came in virginal white or femme fatale black, Heche's is fiery orange. That immediately changes our understanding of Marion, far more sexually confident now than Leigh's schoolmarm gone bad.

This Marion is clearly interested in her beau Sam (Viggo Mortensen's predatory redneck) for sex and adventure, not marriage and a dry-goods store. Her look even hints that she'd be up for a hot night with Norman. Heche, spiky and sly, is all the more impressive when you realise how much she actually moulds her performance to Janet Leigh's own facial signals.

Vince Vaughn's Norman is less successful. Cast against the Anthony Perkins type as a beefy hick with a camp giggle, he remains blank and mechanical. Where Perkins implied a repressed gayness that was part of the original film's great unspoken, this Norman is a good ol' momma's boy who thinks he's straight but is photographed like a gay pin-up.

The really striking changes come when the dialogue is replayed word for word. A reference to Las Vegas - 'playground of the world' - has far tackier cultural resonance than it did in 1960. Little supporting parts benefit - James Le Gros makes the car dealer role, once jovially old-world, become seedy and cynical using exactly the same salesman's patter, tarnished by decades of use. The 'dialogue' between Norman and Mrs Bates sounds more than ever like a creaky amateur dramatics script - precisely what it is.

To ask whether the film works as horror is beside the point. Can we really be scared again by delicate Norman after we've met Jason and Freddy and Leatherface and the rest of his slasher-pic progeny? (And surely in the nineties, even a recluse like Norman would have seen and learned from TV repeats of "Halloween"?) This "Psycho" is no exercise in genre back-to-basics, but an exploration of repetition and the uncanny, and a demonstration of how our attitudes have changed - to cinema, violence, sexuality, madness and normality.

Somehow, Van Sant has managed to spin a big-budget studio project into a piece of conceptual art, a provocative inquiry into the nature of cinematic originality. It's not the full-on 'queer Psycho' that Van Sant fans predicted, but it is an extraordinary drag act. Just as Norman achieved immortality by dressing up as Mother, Van Sant disguises himself as Hitchcock, represses his own personality entirely - and delivers his most distinctive film in ages. His "Psycho" may not be scary, but it's one hell of a test case for the auteur theory.