UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF A WOMAN

In 2000, I got to briefly interview Gena Rowlands for Phoenix New Times ahead of her appearance at a showing of A Woman Under the Influence in Scottsdale.

At the beginning of this chat, I indulged in a rather shamelessly unprofessional bit of gush:

"You know, I talk to famous people all the time, so I don't get starstruck much any more," I told her. "But talking to you is an exception."

She acted very girlishly flattered. Maybe she really was, or maybe she was just acting. Either way, it was an honor to be on the receiving end of it.

The word awesome gets thrown around a lot, but Gena Rowlands was awesome.

She did a lot of routine roles that seemed like they were just to pay the bills, and she was good even in that stuff, but when she worked with John Cassavetes--in A Woman Under the Influence, in Minnie and Moskowitz, in Gloria, in the underrated Tempest (directed by Paul Mazursky, but opposite a brilliant Cassavetes as her leading man) or in the grueling Opening Night--she was luminous. Potent as they are at their best, the films that Cassavetes directed can also be overwrought and exhausting, but her classic performances make them indispensably worth it.

Just a few days ago I happened to see her, very young, in an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour called "Ride the Nightmare," opposite Hugh O'Brian.

One of O'Brian's criminal cronies, who he betrayed years earlier, has come seeking revenge, and is holding him at gunpoint. But when the crook gets a load of Rowlands, as O'Brian's wife, he can't help but remark "You did alright for yourself; she's a winner."

Indeed she is. Rest in peace and joy goddess.

NORMAN HOLIDAY

Happy Psycho Day everybody!

That's right, December 11 is the date that appears over the downtown Phoenix skyline at the beginning of the 1960 Hitchcock classic Psycho, one of my all-time favorite movies, before the camera peeks inappropriately into a window to show John Gavin and Janet Leigh sharing an afternoon tryst. The fine folks at FilmBar Phoenix, situated not far at all from the area seen in that opening shot, celebrate the auspicious occasion this evening at 7 p.m. with a showing of the film.

Check out my Phoenix Magazine column noting the event, along with my reviews of Alfonso Cuaron's superb Roma and Swimming With Men, a Britcom starring Rob Brydon.

WHALE TALE, HOLY GRAIL, HITCHCOCK HAIL

Opening this weekend:

In the Heart of the Sea—In 1820, the Nantucket whaler Essex was attacked by a sperm whale in the Pacific, thousands of miles west of South America. It sank, and the crew went through hell and resorted to extreme measures to stay alive. Ron Howard has tried to turn Nathaniel Philbrick’s acclaimed 2000 account of this awful trip, one of the inspirations for Moby-Dick, into a psychologically and spiritually fraught adventure in its own right.

As usual with Howard, it’s a well-made movie with many rousing scenes. The whale effects are mostly very good and convincing, and the actors do solid, respectable work. But the movie doesn’t come off, overall.

Chris Hemsworth plays Chase, the first mate, at Melvillian odds with the haughty novice Captain, Pollard (Benjamin Walker, nicely restrained in a thankless role). The product of a venerable whaling family, Pollard resents the effortless seamanship of Chase, the son of a “landsman.”

This conflict becomes moot when a huge, patchy-white sperm whale decides to go Zidane on the hull of the Essex. I must confess that I enjoyed the leviathan’s vengeance more than anything else in ITHOTS. I felt good for the beast, much the way one might feel good for Charles Bronson in a Death Wish movie.

I found it hard to sympathize with whalers, not because they weren’t courageous and skillful but because I brought a 21^st-Century sense of their enterprise as an environmental atrocity into the movie with me. I realize that this response is pious hindsight, and that our age doesn’t have any real right to feel superior about how we light our cities, that indeed in the grand scheme of things it’s probably a far greater blight on the planet than hunting a few sea mammals to the brink of extinction. It may come down to Orwell’s observation in “Shooting an Elephant”: “Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.”

But whatever the reason, it interfered with my enjoyment of ITHOTS. I think Howard and screenwriter Charles Leavitt anticipated it too. They’ve toned down the horror wrought by the Essex crew, omitting, for instance, their ecologically disastrous visit to the Galapagos, and giving Chase’s final encounter with the whale an ambiguity that falls flat as drama. Melville turned this story into an astonishing, exasperating myth, an allegory that transcends and almost reproaches the very idea of allegory. But ITHOTS is just one more story about The One That Got Away.

Opening this weekend at Harkins Valley Art in Tempe:

Don Verdean—Sam Rockwell plays the title character, an evangelical archaeologist who claims to have unearthed such relics as the shears used to cut Samson’s hair. Bankrolled by a preacher (Danny McBride) anxious over his dwindling flock, Don travels to Israel in search of the skull of Goliath. Under pressure from his patron, and abetted by his unscrupulous local digger Boaz (Jermaine Clement), Don, who sincerely wants to save souls, gradually succumbs to the temptation to fake this discovery. Of course, things only get wackier and worse from there, as Don and Boaz eventually agree to provide a buyer with the “Holy Grail of Biblical artifacts,” which is, of course, the Holy Grail.

This is the latest from Jared Hess of Napoleon Dynamite, again from a script co-written with his wife Jerusha. As with their other post-Napoleon films, Nacho Libre and Gentlemen Broncos, it’s seriously uneven. The Hess touch, so to speak, is all about awkward pauses and fitful, off-kilter bursts of slapstick action, and when it works it’s punishingly funny, and when it doesn’t, it just hangs there on the screen, not working.

The acting is terrific, however. McBride and Will Forte ham it up a bit more than they have to as the rival preachers, but Clement takes the opportunity, as he did in Gentlemen Broncos, to deploy another shamelessly silly accent. Amy Ryan gives us so much subtext as Don’s adoring assistant that she’s almost too touching for the farcical tone.

And as usual, Rockwell is a marvel. His Don hides his poker face behind a thick beard, speaking in a firm, sober drawl—he sounds like George W. Bush mixed with Johnny Cash—and authoritatively puts everyone at ease. In their ridiculous way, Rockwell and Hess offer a plausible, even somewhat affectionate portrait of how a decently-intentioned person could allow himself to be corrupted.

Opening this weekend at Harkins Shea:

Hitchcock/Truffaut—This documentary is both a film version of and a tribute to the famous 1966 book-length interview of Alfred Hitchcock by the young Francois Truffaut. Familiar to just about every film geek of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the tome is credited with helping to change the perception of Hitchcock as a talented craftsman and entertainer to that of an artist.

Thus the movie, directed by Kent Jones, features talking heads ranging from Wes Anderson to Richard Linklater to Kiyoshi Kurosawa to Martin Scorcese, talking not only about how much they love Hitchcock and Truffaut but also about how much they loved the book. We get clips from the movies, and audio clips of the interviews, and a little narration, by Bob Balaban.

So what’s not to like? Nothing; it’s a fine way to spend 80 minutes. But as with the best documentaries about cinema, it’s an appetizer—it leaves you hungry for whole movies.

HUSBAND AND KNIFE

It’s possible that I’m not the best judge of Hitchcock.

It’s a movie about the making of Sir Alfred’s 1960 classic Psycho, which is, truly, one of my two or three favorite movies. It has a fine cast, including a number of extremely attractive actresses, two of them—Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Biel—decked out in Psycho costumes. It’s set in an elegant recreation of Hollywood swank, circa the late ‘50s.

For all of these reasons, I enjoyed it. But I don’t know that even all of them together quite make it a good movie. Hitchcock, directed by Sacha Gervasi, from a script by John J. McLaughlin based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, is fun to watch, but somehow I couldn’t quite find it convincing.

The main reason, I think, lies with the title personage. He’s played by Anthony Hopkins, padded and plastered to resemble the great man, to little avail. Powerhouse though Hopkins is, he couldn’t make me believe he was Alfred Hitchcock, or even simply forget he’s not Hitchcock, which might have been enough. It isn’t his fault—I don’t think any actor could. I haven’t seen the HBO movie The Girl, about the making of The Birds, but I hear Toby Jones doesn’t really swing it either.

The word “inimitable” is thrown around a lot in show business, but beyond the level of an easy Rich Little impression, Hitchcock really is inimitable, at least for someone of my generation. His canny on-camera self-promotion made him indelible to Boomer-era TV viewers and moviegoers. Nobody looks like that—for all the heroic efforts of the make-up folk, Hopkins looks more like late-vintage Rod Steiger than Hitchcock—nobody sounds like that, and nobody, I think, is really likely to capture that same grave drollery of manner. Hopkins gives a sometimes funny, sometimes touching portrait of a weird repressed middle-aged guy, but not of this particular weird repressed middle-aged guy.

Similarly, Hitchcock overplays its hand in dramatizing the making of Psycho. That film, as hardly anyone needs to be told, is Hitchcock’s modestly-budgeted, brilliantly-crafted California-gothic about Norman Bates, a sweet young motel manager who has an unusually close relationship with his mother—lethally close, to any strangers who encroach on it. It was adapted from a lurid little novel by Robert Bloch, which was in turn loosely based on the much grimmer real-life exploits of Wisconsin psychopath Ed Gein in 1957.

Hitchcock was slumming a bit when he took on the project, no doubt, challenging himself to make a profitable low-budget shocker, using the crew from his TV series, instead of the glamorous, romantic Technicolor thrillers he’d been turning out for the last decade or so. It’s doubtful he could have guessed he was making the movie for which he’d be best remembered.

Gervasi's film, on the other hand, tries to generate dramatic urgency by creating the sense that Psycho was a make-or-break crisis point in Hitchcock’s career. Much is made of Hitchcock’s own investment in the project, though the practical minded Mrs. H (Helen Mirren) points out that the peril to their fortune is along the lines of having to buy domestic rather than imported pate de fois gras. Gervasi and McLaughlin even resort to showing Hitchcock’s dreams haunted by the specter of Ed Gein (Michael Wincott). This feels like an overwrought reach.

So Hitchcock comes to life, mostly, in incidental episodes, and in the cast—James D’Arcy absolutely nailing the small role of Anthony Perkins, Toni Collette, ravishingly chic as Hitchcock’s right arm Peggy Robertson. Biel looks great as Vera Miles, and Johansson really did her homework as Janet Leigh, perfectly capturing Leigh’s pursed-lipped, mock-perplexed cock of the head (I did wonder, though, why Leigh and Miles ever needed to be on the set on the same day).

It could be argued, however, that Sir Alfred isn’t the the true title character of Hitchcock anyway. The film’s best element is Helen Mirren as Alma Reville Hitchcock. The good lady had been the director’s editor and screenwriter/script-doctor in the old days, and was still his most trusted adviser. In Mirren’s sharp, jumpy turn, she’s a clear-thinking, patient sort, but flustered and emotionally hungry from her husband’s neglect, and susceptible to the seductions of the screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston).

Mirren’s vibrancy turns Hitchcock, at its best, into a mild comedy about a sexually frustrated middle-aged married couple; the fact that they were responsible for Psycho becomes a secondary matter. Yet Gervasi and McLaughlin do virtually claim for Alma an uncredited hand in the Psycho screenplay. While they go quite a bit farther with this suggestion than Rebello’s book does, there can be little doubt of how much he owed her (he was always fulsome in his praise of her). If the movie does nothing more than drag Alma’s role in the Hitchcock story out of her husband’s formidable shadow, it’s served a worthwhile purpose.