Biopics are a tricky business, as I’ve said in reviews past. Generally speaking, if someone warrants a feature film biography to tell the story of their lives, then that person is likely quite famous, or infamous as the case may be. Either their particular story is so fascinating that it begs to be told, or the individual at the heart of it is so influential and renowned that it’s simply a matter of time before they wind up splashed on the big screen in a dramatic retelling. And as far filmmakers go, Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most instantly recognisable figures in the history of the medium. His work is known throughout the world, and, thanks to his trademark walk-on cameos and his television series, he is also a very recognisable face. A story of his life was bound to end up on the silver screen at some point. As it happens, almost at the exact same time, there were two… The Girl, a BBC TV movie starring Toby Jones as the man himself, and the theatrically-released Hitchcock, starring Anthony Hopkins in the titular role.

The difference between these two projects is this: The Girl looks into the relationship between the great director and one of his leading ladies, Tippi Hedren, as based on a book by Donald Spoto. Hitchcock looks into the making of perhaps his most famous films, Psycho, whilst studying his relationship with his wife and long-time collaborator, Alma Reville.

Before I get to the film at hand, it’s worth noting that The Girl was a complete hatchet job. Though there was nothing necessarily wrong with it on a technical level (performances are good, looks very nice, etc.), it was an exercise in dragging the name and reputation of Alfred Hitchcock through the mud. Upon broadcast, the film received a huge amount of criticism from those who knew the man and leapt instantly to his defence, decrying the film, and the book that served as its basis, as an affront and disgrace. What’s even more absurd about it is that it’s so easy to actually refute the portrayal of events in The Girl that it’s almost just an exercise in filmic trolling. This is not the man, and The Girl is a failure as a biopic as a result. And a pretty despicable one at that.

Now, we look to Hitchcock, the film that received much more hype and anticipation than The Girl, with a great deal of that going towards Anthony Hopkins in the title role. It’s quite true that he doesn’t look a jot like him, even with a heap of prosthetics that are actually more of a distraction than anything else. However, Hopkins himself served up an excellent argument that such a concern doesn’t really matter when he portrayed President Richard Nixon in the Oliver Stone biopic, Nixon, in 1995. Again, he looks nothing like the man, but dammit all if he didn’t capture that man up there.

The other things this film has going for it is the dual focus of Hitchcock’s relationship with his wife Alma, which is something of wonderful dramatic potential from real life, and the making of one of the defining horror films in the history of the medium, Psycho. Throw in supporting work from Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Danny Huston and Michael Stuhlbarg, as far as what this film has to work with, it’s a strong and solid bedrock on which to build a fine film.

However, it’s almost as much of a failure as The Girl in its depiction of Alfred Hitchcock, the man.

Word in many critical circles has not been particularly kind about Hitchcock, with the chief reason for this being that Alfred Hitchcock is a filmmaker, and as such is incredibly familiar to those who make their living in that industry. It may be fairly new terrain for those who have not read numerous books on the subject of arguably one of the greatest directors who ever lived, but to those who know better, the film kind of smacks of disingenuous hucksterism, stretching poetic licence pretty much beyond breaking point. As far as this film would have it, Alfred Hitchcock was a bloated egotist and borderline lunatic, prone to cruel acts born of spite, jealousy and an undercurrent of sexual perversion. Sure, he was a prankster, but this is beyond that.

This is itself something of a point to consider, though. Hitchcock’s films have often been aligned with certain traits, motifs and thematic occurrences. Amongst these traits is the notion of the voyeur, of watching someone in potentially their most private moments without their knowledge (see Rear Window and Psycho for two examples). And then there’s also a repeated notion of a villain that everyone can like or feel sympathy for (see Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train, or even Anthony Perkins in Psycho). He’s also been accused of misogyny, as evidenced by his apparent predilection for placing women in great peril (see… well, quite a few of his films).

Since these are filmic traits associated with Alfred Hitchcock, and many argue are specific indicators as to the man’s psyche, what this film does is attempt to marry the events surrounding the making of the film Psycho with the purely theoretical underpinnings as noted and debated in his body of work. This could have been an interesting angle, maybe even a valid one, were things left somewhere under the surface, only being occasionally glimpsed. However, the film regularly points a klieg light at such ideally subtextual concerns, such as having scenes in which the director is visited by and converses with the real life murderer, and basis for Psycho, Ed Gein (actually played very well by Michael Wincott). These brief chats may be entirely imaginary, but the film seems to be making some point that Hitchcock was genuinely unhinged, taking marital advice from a murdering psychotic. A scene in which Hitchcock swings a knife wildly at a legitimately terrified Janet Leigh during the shower scene really just compounds this idea.

And then there’s how they deal with the relationship between Alfred and Alma. Genuinely, the lives of these two together is something that is regarded with some level of respect, given that theirs was a marriage and working relationship that served as a very profitable collaboration of talents and personalities. They complimented each other well. I certainly don’t mean to say that their lives were free of tribulation, but Hitchcock seems to have reworked things to a more… well, pedestrian mould. It’s not really to say that it doesn’t work as a dramatic work, because it does. The problem is that it’s pretty much the arc of the frustrated wife, married to the genius artist, but whose own efforts don’t get the full credit they deserve. And the fact that the characterisation of each of them is kind of off anyway, it makes it for a less involving turn. Both Hopkins and Mirren do put in the effort, but they were on rocky ground as it is.

There is a final, much bigger notion I want to briefly touch on… you know, cause this review hasn’t gone on nearly long enough. You’ll notice that, like other reviews, many of the points I’ve made here can be tied to the fact that I have a fair amount of prior knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock. With that, I can point out gaps, omissions and simple falsehoods in the depiction of someone I know about. Hollywood turned the biopic machine on one of its own and has been met with a not inconsiderable amount of backlash as a result. Certainly the contention could be made that this is a dramatisation of events, not a documentary. Poetic and creative licence have been utilised to weave a more intriguing, if less accurate story. As such, it sits quite well with other filmed biopics of individuals, where events have been tailored, embellished or flat-out made up in trying to pursue a good story. An example of such that springs immediately to mind is A Beautiful Mind, Ron Howard’s film on the life of mathematician John Nash, which takes some huge liberties with the true story.

However, this is much to the final point. The purpose of a biopic is to tell the story of an individual, and more importantly, to create an accurate sense of who they are/were and why they warranted their own film. Some sacrifices can be made in pursuit of the former if the latter is achieved stronger. But with Hitchcock, the sense we get of Alfred Hitchcock is far removed from reality, doing the man a great injustice and making this whole endeavour pointless. And the sacrifices made for the sake of drama just come off clunky and forced. A pretty poor show all round.