'Hitchcock' - Movie Review

"Hitchcock" is a fictionalized version of Stephen Rebello's book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, starring about as good a cast as it was possible to get: Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock, Helen Mirren as his wife, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collette, Danny Huston, and Jessica Biel.

Hitchcock had just released his very successful "North by Northwest," and wanted to do something different. Predictably, the studio wanted him to do something very similar. When he chose Robert Bloch's Psycho, the studio abandoned him and he was forced to self-finance - including mortgaging their very large home. There's a big subplot about Hitchcock's wife Alma working as a screenwriter with a dashing younger man (Huston) and Hitchcock's suspicions about that.

Hopkins is almost unrecognizable under all the prosthetics they've applied. I also think it's possibly his worst acting in years (which is to say it's adequate ... just not brilliant as I've come to expect). Johansson is locked into a very polite-little-actress role as Janet Leigh - she does almost nothing. James D'Arcy is surprisingly good as Anthony Perkins, although he doesn't have a lot to do either. While the movie is ostensibly about the making of "Psycho," it's primarily about the relationship between Hitchcock and his wife, who - according to this (I don't know if it's accurate or not) - was his biggest collaborator across decades.