Robbing Hitchcock

7:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 4 I’m sitting in a movie theater with my wife, waiting for Gus Van Sant’s highly anticipated remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Van Sant has shocked pundits and cinephiles worldwide with the announcement that his Psycho will be a virtual shot-for-shot and line-for-line copy of the classic. So, to get into the spirit of things, this will be a moment-by-moment review.

7:38 p.m. There are some noticeable differences right off the bat. In the opening scene between Marion Crane and her boyfriend in the seedy hotel, Van Sant has added sex noises. The update from black-and-white to color is distracting, especially since Van Sant has dressed the room and the actors in vivid pastels. Most odd are the performances of Anne Heche and Viggo Mortensen, whose naturalistic acting styles are way too flat for Joseph Stefano’s punchy dialogue.

7:57 p.m. Bernard Herr-mann’s score over the rainy highway shots are still tense as hell. When the Bates Motel appears, and Heche pulls in, my wife leans over and whispers, “Apparently, she’s never seen Psycho.”

7:59 p.m. Vince Vaughn appears as Norman Bates and is instantly likable. He’s aping Anthony Perkins, but with flashes of rage and confusion that are more modern. It’s a good interpretation of the role—smooth, but not as slickly charming as Perkins.

8:05 p.m. They eat. Was it always this creepy for a strange man to be alone with a frail-looking woman, or is that just the times? Heche has improved her acting to match Vaughn, who has the anxious manner of a teenager waiting for his parents to go out so he can masturbate.

8:15 p.m. Mister Bates masturbates.

8:18 p.m. Shower time—aaaaah! This is where shot-by-shot is really noticeable, since we all know this sequence by heart. Van Sant adds shots of storm clouds gathering. He also shows Heche’s bare ass, at an angle that is downright crude. The blood is very red and almost overwhelms the intensity of the scene.

8:32 p.m. Enter Julianne Moore! And William H. Macy! And Flea?

8:35 p.m. Macy investigates. He has the perfect acting style for old-timey dialogue. The color is faded, like stock footage. Shouldn’t Macy be in black-and-white?

8:47 p.m. The second on-screen murder. Van Sant inserts shots of a cow in the road and what looks to be a naked woman. To be honest, the scene is grisly, and I’m watching through laced fingers.

8:50 p.m. Moore, as Lila Crane, says, “Let me get my Walkman.” This is one of the few self-conscious updates to the dialogue. One thing about the shot-by-shot discipline—it precludes the smirkiness of contemporary remakes, which always try to be above their material.

9:02 p.m. Maybe it’s because I know what’s going to happen at the end, or the absence of the original’s stark B&W cinematography, but these closing scenes strike me as dry and perfunctory.

9:04 p.m. Lila investigating the Bates house is still creepy, though, maybe more than ever. It’s a house frozen in time—’50s dresses, the toys and fetishes of adolescence. And the motel seems even more dilapidated in this era of affordable luxury hotels.

9:06 p.m. Don’t go in the cellar!

9:17 p.m. The final credit—“In Memory of Alfred Hitchcock.” Awwwww....

9:40 p.m. Home and thinking. Hitchcock once said, “Actors are like cattle,” which may be the theory that Van Sant is trying to prove by sticking new cows in an established mise-en-scène. There are times when this new Psycho seems curiously lifeless, like a snapshot of a Georges Seurat painting. You can’t interact with it much; the movie has already been boxed into one line-of-sight. But mostly Van Sant’s film works because the original worked, and even if his attempts to make his title character crazier don’t quite pan out, Vaughn at least proves as fascinating as Perkins.

Bottom line? Won’t supplant Hitchcock, but should be viewed side-by-side by film students for years. Not a travesty, as some had suspected. Quote that, publicists!

—Noel Murray

The best way to criticize a movie, Jean-Luc Godard once said, is to make a movie. Bankrolled by major-studio suckers to the tune of $20 million, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho must be the most expensive movie review ever made. Watching the director of Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho wrestle with Hitchcock’s technically precise blueprint is like watching someone try to build a working computer out of twigs. And yet it’s the imperfections that illuminate Van Sant’s methods as clearly as they define Hitchcock’s.

The big question is, why? There’s already a very effective scene-for-scene Psycho parody/homage: Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill. (It kills off its biggest star in the first half, includes not one but two shower scenes, and lampoons that terrible closing gabfest with the psychiatrist.) Plus Van Sant’s own style is nothing like Hitchcock’s: He’s at once a more humane and less technically proficient filmmaker than the Master of Suspense.