Don’t use that knife on foie gras

In 1960, American movies couldn’t even show a toilet being flushed. You can imagine how they dealt with sex and violence. Or you can remember, even if you weren’t yet alive then, because you know that things changed that year with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

How they changed is of little concern to Hitchcock, another defanged Hollywood history done in the biopic-snapshot style (see also My Week With Marilyn) and complete with voguish prosthetic distraction—this time in the fat-suited form of Anthony Hopkins, rolling suspenselessly along as the master of suspense. As Janet Leigh, Scarlett Johansson leads with her cheekbones and remains ever gracious. “Compared to Orson Welles, he’s a sweetheart,” she says. Maybe.

Perhaps afraid of appealing only to a rarefied film-wonk crowd, director Sacha Gervasi (Anvil: The Story of Anvil) settles very early into broad, easy strokes. The result is companionable but eventually sort of irritating, like a good friend with a bad habit of pantomimed stabbings and a cappella renditions of Bernard Herrmann’s violins. Reportedly—and demonstrably—Gervasi was prevented by copyright restrictions from using any actual Psycho images or direct recreations thereof. Bravely, he went ahead anyway, heeding if not exactly living up to the master’s example: Worried about advancing age and declining reputation, this Hitch bucks all career advice and stakes his house on a self-financed adaptation of Robert Bloch’s novel, which in turn derives from the true story of Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, who appears to the director in a few cheesy and ill-advised dream sequences.

“But what if someone really good made a horror picture?” Hitch has cause to ask. The answer is that it would alter the course of the genre, paving the way for, among other things, Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs; in Hitchcock, those days seem far away indeed. But at least that question is properly directed to his wife, unsung collaborator and damage controller Alma Reville, played here with poised enjoyment by Helen Mirren.

Puffing up its behind-every-great-man mythology, which is at least good and righteous and quite true in this case, Hitchcock strikes an unconvincing, unilluminating pose of feminism. While her husband paws at his pile of blond women’s headshots or peeps like Norman Bates at his leading lady through a hole in her dressing-room wall, Alma merely negotiates the flirtatious attention of a less famous but more romantically inclined colleague (Danny Huston). That leaves us waiting around while the Hitchcocks endure these blatantly screenwriterly obstacles to marital and creative fulfillment.

More promisingly, as Janet Leigh guides her co-star Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) through the minefield of their director’s neurotic misogyny, with both ladies looking splendid in period costumes, Hitchcock briefly begins to feel like an episode of Mad Men. Too bad it doesn’t have time, or apparent interest, to develop much further in that vein. Meanwhile, James D’Arcy does a fine impression of Anthony Perkins, but the film doesn’t seem to need him.

Adapted by John J. McLaughlin from Stephen Rebello’s book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Gervasi’s film strikes a chastely mischievous tone, inadvertently making clear that nobody but Hitchcock ever could really nail that tone. Another useful source might have been David Thomson’s recent book The Moment of Psycho, which offers this reminder: “Throughout the fifties (his best work) the films are charged with the lust and guilt of watching a beloved figure under stress. In Psycho another such woman—Janet Leigh—is remorselessly studied for forty minutes and then torn to pieces.” This is fertile material, all right, but not for a feel-good movie.

Yet everything works out in Hitchcock. We behold the tidy arc of an artist’s anguish redeemed: He goes from helplessly pigging out on canned foie gras to infusing the shower scene with his own murderous fury to cuing audience screams like a triumphant conductor. Masterfully, he got Psycho made, and we’re all the richer for it, but the legacy isn’t only happy-ending stuff. Next came The Birds, and to see Hitchcock at work on that, try HBO’s The Girl, which offers another take, this time from Tippi Hedren’s point of view.