Julianne Moore's Romanticization of Suffering

I used to be a big fan of Julianne Moore all the way back to the early 1990s when I saw her in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" (1993) and thought she was superb in it.  In a short amount of time, I saw everything she had made up to that point and I felt like I had discovered a rising star.  I often told friends to keep an eye out for Julianne Moore and to expect great things from her.  So it was very enjoyable and satisfying to see her rise to prominence in the later part of the decade and into the early 2000s when it seemed as if she was appearing in every major movie being made.  At the time, I was much younger and had much less life experience.  As such, I thought it was cool to discover an actress who had movie star glamor attached to her who also seemed willing to play roles in a very gritty, off-beat manner.  I praised what I thought at the time was her range and originality.  However, as I have gotten older and gained more life experience, my opinion about Julianne Moore has also changed considerably as well.

I absolutely cannot stand Julianne Moore as an actress or as an individual these days.  There's something about her I find off-putting, cold and self-indulgent as an actress.  No doubt, she is a very technically proficient and skillful performer, but I think she is far too attracted to the dark side of humanity in a way that borders on being misanthropic.  She seems to revel in bringing out the worst qualities in a character, rather than trying to find the humanity and redeeming aspects of an individual.  When she played Sarah Palin in the HBO movie "Game Change" (2012), I found her performance to be one-dimensional and predictable.  She didn't show us anything about Sarah Palin that we didn't already suspect.  I never got the impression that she tried hard to find anything original to base the character on.  I'm not a fan of Palin at all, but I would have preferred it if Moore had tried to find the humanity in her in a way that was more inspired.  (Even Tina Fey brings more humanity to her characterization of Palin with her humorous interpretation of Palin's personality.)  I have no problems with actors and actresses playing characters as unsympathetically and gritty as they need to be.  But, in Julianne Moore's case, I get the feeling that she seems interested in taking characters that were not meant to be dark or pathetic or horrible and foisting those qualities upon them whether it is appropriate or not.

Two cases on-point were Moore's appearances in Gus Van Sant's horrendous remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1998) and Ridley Scott's "Hannibal" (2001), the poorly received sequel to "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991).  In both instances, Moore was assuming roles played by, respectively, Vera Miles and Jodie Foster that were already well-known to movie audiences.  Moore added nuances to them that must have seemed inspired and original to her at the time, but now seems heavy-handed and inappropriate in retrospect.  In the case of "Psycho," Moore took the character of Lila Crane, the concerned sister of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh in the original, Anne Heche in the remake) and turned her from a low-key, buttoned-down and sympathetic lady into a grungy, cold, aggressive grouch.  Admittedly, there is not much depth to Lila Crane on the page, but at least Vera Miles didn't try and do anything with the character that stuck out like a sore thumb.  In Moore's presumptuous hands, adding those aspects to the character of Lila didn't help bring depth to the character or enhance the movie.  They just appeared distracting and annoying and showed how Moore failed to understand how Lila was meant to be a plot device to help resolve the storyline.  Because she makes Lila so unsympathetic, you don't care at all what happens to her and this undermines any potential suspense the movie might have had.  It's the perfect instance of an actress who doesn't understand what her character's purpose is in the context of the movie.

Moore does even worse while taking over the role of FBI agent Clarice Starling from Jodie Foster in "Hannibal."  It must have been a daunting task to replace Foster in such an iconic, Oscar-winning performance, but Moore doesn't even give the role a chance.  This is reflected on the surface-level by Moore's god-awful phony Southern accent, which is so broad and grating that it misses the low-key, lyrical subtleties that Foster brought to her Southern accent in the first film.  What made Clarice Starling such a fascinating character wasn't so much her intelligence, courage and assertiveness (though those were all important elements).  Rather, it was the decency, compassion and humility that Foster brought to Clarice that made the character special.  Moore never understood that, which is why in her hands Starling becomes cold, disconnected, impersonal.  Clearly, the qualities of decency that I just described have never been Moore's strong suit as an actress, whereas Jodie Foster on the other hand has made a career out of finding the decent and redeeming qualities in every character and situation.  Mind you, the story and screenplay of "Hannibal" continually puts Starling in situations that don't allow her to demonstrate her strengths the way "The Silence of the Lambs" did, but Moore never does anything to remind us what it was about Clarice that made her such a special individual in the first film.  She makes Starling such a bland, uptight stick-in-the-mud, without the humanity and vulnerability that Foster brought to her, that you wonder why Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) would have remained interested in Clarice's well-being in her later incarnation.  If Moore had played Clarice in "Silence of the Lambs," I doubt Lecter would have ever taken the personal interest in her that he did.

I think the role that really turns me off to Julianne Moore now is, ironically, the one I used to like her in the best, as Linda Partridge in Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" (1999).  In that movie, she played the young trophy wife of a man (Jason Robards) dying of cancer.  She becomes unglued at the thought of losing her husband who she married for his money and used to cheat on.  Moore overacts in scene-after-scene depicting Linda's emotional breakdown during the course of a day.  (She resorts to the sort of melodramatic histrionics that we normally associate with daytime soap operas, but which she ironically never seemed to use back in the day when she was on "As the World Turns.")  Her big scene, blowing up at a nosy, pesky pharmacist while she is picking up prescriptions for her and her husband, used to be one that I greatly admired.  I used to like the uncontrolled rage that she expressed in that scene and thought she deserved an Oscar for it.  (This was back in the day when I thought an actress expressing big emotions, as if she were on-stage projecting to the last row in the theater, constituted good acting.)

But having experienced my own father's battle with cancer, and spending a great deal of time taking care of him at the end of his life, I now realize what an utter fake "Magnolia" is as a movie, and how absolutely awful and artificial Julianne Moore's character and performance was.  Having previously not had that experience of dealing with a loved one's illness, I used to accept the melodramatic emotions in that movie at face value, but now I see it as being phony and contrived.  In my experience, and after talking with nurses and other individuals who have experienced the process of caring for a dying loved one, I realize that people don't often act with rage, anger and craziness the way Julianne Moore (and, to another extent, Tom Cruise) did in that movie.  I have found that people usually try to make things as peaceful as possible for all involved because they are all already physically and emotionally exhausted by that point and want to ensure that their loved one, and everyone nearby who is helping to take care of them, is as peaceful as possible.  It's an experience that makes people less narcissistic and the movie, and Moore's performance, misses that point.  I really resent both "Magnolia" and Julianne Moore for misrepresenting how family members of a dying loved one behave at a time like that.

The only time in the last few years that I thought Julianne Moore gave a good performance was when she returned to "As the World Turns," the daytime soap that launched her career, to briefly reprise her role as Frannie Hughes.  In the April 5, 2010 episode, Frannie returns to help celebrate her parents wedding anniversary.  Because the episode provides Moore a short cameo, she isn't given the broad canvas that she usually has to go out of her mind as an actress and is forced to give a controlled, low-key performance.  It brought out warm and sympathetic qualities that Moore has shunned throughout much of her film career.  She does a good job in the scene where she makes a toast in honor of her parents.  For once, Moore knows that she's there not to take center stage, but to let the other actors shine and, in so doing, brings out the best she has to offer as an actress as well.  Julianne Moore is usually praised for the so-called "reality" she brings to movies by playing characters in an unsympathetic and ugly manner, but I think she was at her most real when she was on daytime television playing a decent person like Frannie Hughes. 

 
I have read interviews through the years where Julianne Moore paints herself as a "boring," "normal" individual who still rides the subways of New York City with her family.  I'm always amused by people who can afford not to take public transit who still do so anyway just because they have romanticized what the rest of us have to do out of necessity.  Moreover, I didn't care for how she described her reasons for becoming a British citizen in another interview a few years ago.  Moore explained that her Scottish-born mother reluctantly renounced her British citizenship and became an American citizen because her father was an Army JAG and couldn't be married to a foreign national.  As Moore recalled, "Her parents emigrated when she was 10, so she didn't have a choice about moving to the United States.  She married my father and had to renounce her British citizenship.  My sister and I both remember her coming home in tears carrying the American flag."  Moore's negative sentiment about her mother's naturalization as an American citizen fails to appreciate the challenges and struggle that immigrants face while becoming American citizens.  At a time in our history when immigration is a hot button issue, and millions of people are trying to become American citizens, Moore demonstrates an arrogant sense of entitlement and a narcissistic lack of humility by painting her mother's naturalization as an American as some sort of tragedy.  Because Moore was born in the United States, and was handed her American citizenship and didn't have to go through the process of working for it like immigrants are required to (and as such doesn't have to live her life worrying whether people will question if she's an American), she doesn't appear to understand how becoming an American citizen is, in fact, a very positive event for many people.  There's nothing tragic about it and Moore's ability to pooh-pooh and characterize it as such seems to demonstrate how she is far too interested in wallowing in negativity.

Moore has also stated in several different interviews that she is attracted to playing dark characters, or finding the darkness in otherwise light characters, because her own life is so stable and happy that it allows her to work out those emotions in her work without having to live it in her own life.  This attraction to finding the darkness even in allegedly brighter situations saw its zenith when she played the unhappy 1950s housewives in both "Far From Heaven" (2002) and The Hours" (2002).  I used to think naively that that showed how grounded she was because she wanted to exorcise negativity from herself by playing it on-screen rather than experiencing it at home.  These days, however, I consider it a pompous, self-serving, elitist statement that suggests the extent to which Julianne Moore sees herself as being better than the rest of humanity, who don't have the luxury of being an actress to play out negative emotions and events in their lives on-screen because they already have to deal with it in their daily reality.

As I get older, I am less and less enthusiastic about misanthropic movies and actors that set out to show the worst that humanity has to offer.  I always try to remain as positive and optimistic as possible, but I also have seen and experienced enough to realize that life can really stink despite one's best efforts otherwise.  There's enough suffering, nihilism, and misanthropy in day-to-day life that I don't enjoy watching movies that self-indulgently wallow in it.  I find it absolutely obnoxious that Julianne Moore thinks it's appealing to play dark and unsympathetic roles because she doesn't have those elements in her own life.  It suggests a lack of humility on Moore's part about the sort of struggle and suffering that other individuals have to deal with in their daily existence.  There's a quote attributed to her on IMDB that says that she realizes, as she gets older, that people have enough darkness in their lives that they want to laugh when they watch something on-screen.  Even though she claims to have had this epiphany, it doesn't seem to be reflected in her own work.  As I get older, I am not for the romanticization of suffering at all, especially not the way Julianne Moore portrays it.

Characters to Root for in "Dressed to Kill"

Brian De Palma's work as a director is not often discussed these days, which is surprising considering how revered and important he was during the 1970s and 1980s.  I think this is because many of his films were entertaining exercises in style over substance.  You were often dazzled by his story construction and visual imagery, but rarely were you touched by the characters in his films.  For someone who purported to take after Alfred Hitchcock, De Palma rarely had any genuine insight into his characters the way Hitchcock did.  For De Palma, his characters were often plot devices to move the story along.  This is not meant as a condemnation, because I have enjoyed many of his films, but it does explain why his work is not as revered as Hitchcock or other major directors of his generation.  You are rarely touched by any of his films.  However, there is one De Palma film that I do think rises to the level of deserving greater acclaim and that's 1980's "Dressed to Kill."  I think what distinguishes this film from others is that De Palma seems to actually care about his protagonists for a change.  In "Dressed to Kill," he creates a trio of characters that the audience identifies with, and genuinely cares about, to the degree that their deaths and/or survival in the movie really matters for a change.

As has already been noted, "Dressed to Kill" takes on the structure of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" in that we begin the movie with the story focused on one blonde woman (Janet Leigh in the Hitchcock movie, Angie Dickinson in the De Palma movie) as she throws caution to the wind and embarks on a series of risky endeavors on the last day of her life that indirectly lead to her premature and violent death at the hands of what appears to be a vicious, violent woman in an enclosed, claustrophobic and otherwise ordinary setting (a shower in "Psycho," an elevator in "Dressed to Kill").  At that point, another blonde (Vera Miles in "Psycho," Nancy Allen in "Dressed to Kill") takes over as the new, heretofore unexpected protagonist who collaborates with a man who had a close relationship with the deceased woman (John Gavin, playing Janet Leigh's lover in "Psycho," Keith Gordon, playing Angie Dickinson's computer geek son in "Dressed to Kill") to solve the mystery and nab the killer.  The killer in each movie turns out to be a man suffering from a split personality disorder that causes them to dress as a woman when they commit their violent crimes (Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in "Psycho," Michael Caine as the repressed psychiatrist in "Dressed to Kill.")  Even though there are some superficial similarities, "Dressed to Kill" has enough intrigue and nuances to it that it is able to stand on its own as a worthy companion piece to "Psycho," instead of another cheap knock off.

One of the reasons I like "Dressed to Kill" is because Angie Dickinson gives one of her best performances as the sexually repressed upper middle-class housewife Kate Miller.  Dickinson courageously opens the movie with both a nude shower scene (a dream sequence) as well as a racy scene in bed where Kate is making love to her husband.  Later, Dickinson has another racy love scene in the back of a taxi cab with a handsome stranger she has encountered in a museum.  Dickinson gives a brave performance throughout these sequences by conveying the loneliness and longing for affection that Kate experiences in her stifling marriage.  Because De Palma directs these love scenes by lingering on Dickinson's expressive face--which convey her feelings of passion, surprise and delight--these scenes do not come across as tasteless or exploitative.  Instead, they come across as a sincere and sensitive expression of a woman's longing for romantic, emotional, and sexual fulfillment.  The normally feisty and bawdy Dickinson suppresses her typically exuberant screen image to create a confused and sympathetic character that the audience feels compassion for.  Kate is a kind and decent person who is clearly a good wife and mother, but is still attractive and vibrant enough to yearn for love and passion in her life.  Dickinson has a good rapport with Keith Gordon, playing Kate's nerdy son Peter.  The scene where Kate and Peter discuss his latest computer invention at home, while arguing over whether he will accompany her to the museum that day, has an authentic sound to it that makes it completely believable that they are mother and son.  Because Dickinson makes a strong impression as to the quality of person Kate is in a short amount of screen time, it is devastating when she is brutally killed in the elevator.

However, Kate's departure from the film allows for the introduction of another fascinating blonde woman in the movie, streetwise high-class prostitute Liz Blake (Nancy Allen).  As individuals, Kate and Liz are polar opposites.  Unlike Kate's sexually repressed comfortable, suburban middle-class housewife existence, Liz makes her living selling her sexuality.  She is completely at ease with that aspect of her life and does not have the insecurities as to her sexual self-worth the way Kate did.  Liz is an ambitious, proactive woman who lives in a classy Manhattan loft, invests money in art and the stock market, and who likely will move on to another line of work once she decides what she wants to do next with her life.  Liz transcends the stereotypical "hooker with a heart of gold" in that she retains her tough exterior, but still demonstrates evidence of being a decent human being.  The only scene where Kate and Liz meet is in the elevator after Kate has been viciously attacked and is bleeding to death, and when Liz is about to board.  Kate silently reaches out to Liz, begging her to help.  Liz, in shock and horror, reaches out to Kate to try and help her until she notices the killer standing nearby, whereupon she snatches the razor from the ground after the killer has dropped it.  Liz was helpless to do anything to save Kate, but her innate decency allows her to have the courage to reach out to another human being in danger.  This is in contrast to Liz's cowardly middle-aged client from out of town, who ran off in horror the moment he saw the bleeding and wounded Kate.  (Ironically, Liz's attempt to help Kate causes her life to be endangered, as her continued presence at the elevator allows the killer to become aware of her.)  Despite the seedy underbelly of society that Liz has seen in her line of work, she's still a good person.

In some respects, when Kate desperately reaches out to Liz in the elevator, she is metaphorically handing over the care and responsibility of her teenage son Peter to Liz.  From the moment of his mother's death, Peter rises to the occasion by mounting an effective and unconventional investigation to bring the perpetrator to justice.  He proves to be a young man of strength and character that his mother would be proud of.  Peter might be presented in the movie as a nerdy computer-whiz, but Keith Gordon portrays him with sympathy and respect.  There's nothing weird, socially inept or off-putting about his character.  When Peter saves Liz from the killer on the subway, he finds an unlikely ally and surrogate mother/sister in the streetwise hooker.  The Peter/Liz scenes are some of the best moments in "Dressed to Kill."  As he did with Angie Dickinson, Keith Gordon has a wonderful rapport with Nancy Allen that you can believe that these beautiful women are delighted to spend time with him.  In turn, Nancy Allen shows a different side to Liz's personality with her friendship and concern for Peter.  Liz still has a tough edge, but demonstrates a responsible, maternal side that suggests she would make a good mother someday.  The scene where Liz tries to comfort Peter when he expresses how much he misses his mother Kate is quite touching.  You root for Peter and Liz to successfully unmask the killer and survive "Dressed to Kill."

In contrast to the Vera Miles/John Gavin characters in "Psycho," Liz and Peter actually have depth and personality.  Miles and Gavin did fine work in "Psycho," but it's clear in that earlier film that Hitchcock had no interest in who Lila Crane and Sam Loomis were as individuals.  Lila and Sam were there to move the plot along, whereas Liz and Peter look like people whose lives, and friendship, will continue long after "Dressed to Kill" ends.  Because his main protagonists are not mere plot devices, "Dressed to Kill" is perhaps Brian De Palma's masterpiece.  For once, he actually seems interested in his protagonists and cares about what happens to them.  He allows them moments of humor, warmth, and sympathy that help to make them engaging characters.  As a result, Kate's death scene never has the cold, clinical quality that is evident in the brilliantly staged, but impersonal, scenes of violence from other De Palma movies.  It's an emotionally shattering experience after everything the audience has shared with Kate.  And, as mentioned before, you enjoy spending time with Liz and Peter so that the finale, with Liz imperiled with the killer nearby, is incredibly suspenseful.  Kate, Liz, and Peter are all vibrant, interesting people who would be fascinating to watch in other kinds of stories, not just the horror-suspense narrative that De Palma has devised for this film. 

"Hitchcock": A Wonderfully Entertaining Lie and Fabrication

I finally got around to seeing the new bio-pic "Hitchcock" (2012) starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren.  As I blogged a few weeks ago, I was curious to see it because it has helped bring attention to the career of Vera Miles, a long-time favorite of mine.  I also said at the time I had concerns that, because I was very familiar with the life of Alfred Hitchcock and had read the book "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of 'Psycho,'" I might object at the first sign of anything that reeked of exaggeration or fabrication.  As I watched the film, however, its charms took over and I very much enjoyed it on its own terms, even though I knew much of it was essentially a lie.  It is well known to anyone who has been on their studio tour that "Psycho" was actually shot on the Universal lot, and not Paramount as this movie alleges, even though Paramount was the studio that initially released it in 1960.  Janet Leigh once stated in an interview that she barely interacted with Vera Miles during the filming of "Psycho," which makes the scenes in "Hitchcock" where Jessica Biel as Miles befriends Scarlett Johansson's Janet Leigh charmingly fanciful hogwash.  In all the books that I've read about the marriage between Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville, there are no suggestions that Reville felt frustrated that her own talents had been overlooked, that she felt any need to be recognized on her own terms (as this film suggests at times), nor that her friendship with writer Whitfield Cook was of a close enough nature to make Hitchcock feel threatened and jealous.

But the fact that much of the film is a lie ultimately doesn't matter because, as I watched "Hitchcock," I realized it was ridiculous to complain about its factual inaccuracies because cinema, essentially, is a fabrication and a lie, even when it attempts to dramatize a real-life incident or subject.  You're not going to get the "truth" (whatever that is) unless you are attempting to create a documentary.  I read a few reviews by critics who were put-off with "Hitchcock" because of its inaccuracies.  I think the basis for this animosity is because film critics are the ones who likely know their Hitchcock film history and don't like it when a film plays fast and loose with a subject THEY know about.  The double standard with that, of course, is they can accept it much more easily in a historical or biographical movie on subjects where they are not experts.  (Ben Affleck's brilliant "Argo" is a perfect example.)  In these instances, critics defend inaccurate films that they personally like on the grounds of "artistic license."  As such, "Hitchcock" should not be considered the definitive, true-life story of one of the cinema's greatest directors.  Instead, it should be seen as an affectionately exaggerated homage of Hitchcock and his wife and colleagues, during a period of time he was working on one of his finest masterpieces, and of a by-gone Hollywood era that existed before summer blockbusters, sequels, and multi-plexes changed the face of the entertainment/cinematic landscape forever.

 
What makes the movie work is how it etches a gallery of engaging characters who just happen to be based on true-life figures in Hollywood history.  They are playing an interpretation of who these people were, not the actual persons themselves.  It's likely that Helen Mirren's character bears little actual resemblance to the real-life Alma Reville, but Mirren's Alma proves to be the heart and soul of the movie.  She effectively portrays an intelligent, talented, and supportive woman who proves to be her husband's best collaborator and ally.  She's always got his back.  Anthony Hopkins is great playing Hitchcock himself.  I disagree with others who felt that they were taken aback by Hopkins's performance and that it took them awhile to get used to it.  I bought it from the very first scene he appeared.  In his skillful hands, Hopkins makes Hitchcock self-indulgent, childish, insecure, insensitive, difficult, brilliant, sympathetic.  He and Mirren have genuine chemistry portraying a married couple who understand one another completely after decades of sharing a professional and personal life together.  What's interesting is how the film portrays both Hitchcock and Alma Reville as two people who love one another so much that they are still able to make each other jealous when their professional attention is diverted by third parties. 

In its portrayal of the real-life actors who starred in "Psycho," the movie plays fair in its depiction of Janet Leigh and Vera Miles.  As played by Scarlett Johannson, Leigh comes across as a consummate, conscientious professional and family-oriented woman and never once succumbs to any shallow movie star stereotypes.  Jessica Biel brings understanding and sympathy to the role of Vera Miles, the Hitchcock protege who fell out of favor with him by becoming pregnant and bowing out of acting in "Vertigo" (1958).  Even though the movie demonstrates how Hitchcock didn't give Vera Miles an easy time of it, Biel portrays her as an intelligent, strong-willed woman who holds her own opposite him, gave as good as she got, and didn't end up becoming his victim, even if he tried to punish her for disappointing him.  At no point does Vera Miles ever come across as Hitchcock's victim the way actresses Tippi Hedren and Diane Baker have alleged they were treated by him in real life.  In "Hitchcock," Miles simply comes across as too self-possessed to ever let it happen.  I am a little disappointed that James D'Arcy was underutilized as Anthony Perkins.  It's a bit perplexing that the screenplay of "Hitchcock" chose to ignore the dramatic potential of further exploring the psyche of the closeted Perkins during a period of his life when he was still seen as a romantic leading man and was wrestling with his sexuality.  Nevertheless, in his few scenes, D'Arcy is sympathetic and convincing in portraying Perkins's insecurity and mannerisms.

This is the second of two films this year dramatizing the life of Alfred Hitchcock.  HBO's TV movie "The Girl," which purports to be about the relationship between Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren during the making of "The Birds" (1963) and "Marnie" (1964) was the other.  Even though both films deal with Hitchcock's obsession with his leading ladies, "Hitchcock" is much less hateful towards its subject matter than "The Girl."  It might touch upon his obsessions and indulgences, but never degenerates into portraying him as a monster.  Some of the best moments in "Hitchcock" are the scenes portraying Hitchcock's interaction with both Janet Leigh and Vera Miles.  We get to see him being both tough and tender with both actresses, and this allows us mere mortals to get a glimpse at the complex relationship that exists between a director and his leading ladies.  My favorite moment is the scene when Vera Miles has completed her work on "Psycho" and bids a poignant farewell to her disappointed mentor.  Biel effectively conveys the respect Miles still feels for Hitchcock despite their professional differences.  Likewise, in the same scene, Hopkins superbly demonstrates the affection Hitchcock felt for Miles and never allows him to come across as a degenerate creep the way Toby Jones played him in "The Girl."  The only thing I objected to in "Hitchcock" were the fantasy scenes depicting Hitchcock being visited by Ed Gein, the real life serial killer that writer Robert Bloch based the Norman Bates character upon.  The scenes suggest that Hitchcock felt an affinity with Ed Gein, which exaggerates things a little too much for my tastes.  Even though I recognize the filmmakers' need to create intrigue, because the making of "Psycho" probably didn't have enough on-set drama to justify a feature-length movie, I simply don't feel that there are enough commonalities between Hitchcock and Gein to warrant that juxtaposition.  But that's a minor quibble for a movie that, even though I don't consider it award-worthy material, is still genuinely delightful and entertaining. 

Another Look at Vera Miles

 
Because things have been so busy this holiday weekend, I have not gotten around to seeing the new movie "Hitchcock" (2012) a docu-drama purportedly about the making of Alfred Hitchcock's classic "Psycho" (1960), but I want to.  I admit, however, that I am a bit wary of the movie after reading reviews indicating that the movie heavily fictionalizes the details of the making of the film, and the relationships of its real-life participants and collaborators.  I read the Stephen Rebello book that the movie is based on, "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of 'Psycho'" many times through the years and can recall many of the documented anecdotes and incidents that Rebello uncovered in his research.  With that foreknowledge, I am afraid that I'll be sitting there with skepticism if I see something depicted in "Hitchcock" that runs counter to what I already know are the established facts surrounding "Psycho."

That being said, I have to admit that I am glad the movie exists because it has brought some well-deserved attention to the career of actress Vera Miles, who starred in "Psycho" as Lila Crane, the younger sister of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in the movie.  It has been well-documented that Miles was a Hitchcock protege that he put under contract in an effort to groom her to become another Grace Kelly, and that he lost interest in her when she became pregnant and bowed out of starring in "Vertigo" (1958).  According to Rebello's book, Hitchcock cast Miles in "Psycho" in a money-saving effort to cast a relatively well-known actress in the role of Lila who he didn't have to pay a huge salary to because she was already under contract to him.  There's an assumption that Miles lost the chance to become a big star by not appearing in "Vertigo," but I have always disagreed with that.  "Vertigo," by many accounts, was not a huge box-office hit at the time.  Thankfully, in later years it has been accorded the level of esteem that it deserved, but it did not happen right away.  I don't think Vera Miles would have been catapulted into the stratosphere of super-stardom if she had simply appeared in that film because it wasn't as appreciated at the time.  It's also not fair to single her out as the odd-man in the Hitchcock leading lady sweepstakes.  It's not as if Eva Marie Saint, Janet Leigh, or Tippi Hedren continued to set the world on fire with choice roles in major theatrical features in the decades that immediately followed their work with Hitchcock.

I always felt it was inaccurate of film historians to discuss Vera Miles as an actress who somehow had a "lesser" career because she didn't appear in "Vertigo."  If you look at the body of her work, she had an extraordinary career both before and after her collaborations with Hitchcock that belies any notion that she had missed her potential.  She was wonderful in John Ford's "The Searchers" (1956) and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962), and worked with directors as diverse as Don Siegel, Henry Hathaway, and Robert Aldrich.  Even though she missed the chance to star in "Vertigo," she nevertheless worked with director Alfred Hitchcock on "The Wrong Man" (1957), "Psycho" (1960), and on episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "Ford Star Time."  She also worked with "Vertigo" leading man James Stewart on both "The FBI Story" (1959) and on the aforementioned "Liberty Valance" (1962).  One can argue that, even if she didn't do "Vertigo," she still enjoyed the benefits that would have come from appearing in that film by working with its director and star on other projects.  I was always offended by Jane Fonda's mean-spirited line in the movie "The Morning After" (1986).  Fonda played a drunken, washed-up actress in that film who boasts to Jeff Bridges that "They were grooming me to be the next Vera Miles...I was supposed to replace somebody the audience didn't even know was missing."  It was a smug line that was totally unjustified in the context of discussing Vera Miles.

In the end, by following her own path, I think Vera Miles had a much better career by becoming the sort of "TV guest star" actress from the 1950s through the mid 1990s that allowed her to play a variety of roles that she would probably have been prevented from doing if she had become a stereotypical "movie star."  I never considered Vera Miles anything less than a supremely successful actress due to her frequent appearances on episodic TV guest appearances and TV movies in the 1970s and 1980s during the time I was growing up.  Her credits in this category are too numerous to mention and I would wager that her frequent appearances helped her accumulate a SAG pension that most actors would envy.  I particularly remember Vera Miles fondly in the 1976 ABC TV movie "Smash Up on Interstate 5."  Miles played an attractive, middle-aged divorcee who finds herself falling in love with a hunky, much younger truck driver (David Groh), who rescued her from being picked on by a motorcycle gang.  Both she and Groh end up being statistics in the film's eponymous massive freeway car pile-up.  Miles defied the sort of stereotypical assumptions Hollywood has for middle-aged actresses, and was truly lovely and romantic playing a woman who is still attractive, and whose heart is still open and receptive, to finding love in her life.  Her character even drives a sporty European red convertible, rather than a much less glamorous vehicle, that reflects her romantic and adventurous outlook.  It's one of my favorite Vera Miles performances.

Anyway, I'll be very interested to see how they have portrayed Vera Miles on-screen in "Hitchcock."  I was heartened to see some very thoughtful and articulate interviews on YouTube with Jessica Biel, who plays Vera Miles in "Hitchcock," and who appears to have approached the responsibility of portraying Miles in a respectful manner very seriously.  In addition to doing the expected research by watching film clips and reading articles about Miles, Biel discusses how she conferred with Vera Miles's grandson in order to have an understanding of who Miles is as an individual.  Because we expect the current generation of young actors and actresses to be callow people who have no interest in the history of Hollywood, or of anything else prior to 1999, I'm glad to see that Biel recognized the privilege she had been handed in being asked to portray Vera Miles on-screen.  Even if Biel looks and sounds nothing like Vera Miles, she appears to have had enough respect for the subject matter to be conscientious about trying to get it right.  Biel even defends Vera Miles's career when a stupidly pretentious, no-nothing interviewer dismisses her post-Hitchcock career as being "almost all television."  Because of her sincere commitment to the role, perhaps Jessica Biel is not as unlikely a choice to play Vera Miles as I had initially thought.