There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that when Anthony Perkins was playing Norman Bates in Psycho, his director Alfred Hitchock addressed the actor as Master Bates on the set. Perhaps it was with this in mind that Gus Van Sant takes his homage to Hitchcock to certain extremes in his remake of Psycho by having Norman Bates masturbating as he peers through the peep-hole in the build-up to the movie's celebrated shower sequence.
This, clearly, is not the frame-by-frame remake of Psycho we had been led to expect. There are other differences. The new film is in colour, so Marion Crane's blood runs red, not black, in the shower. In that sequence we see rather more of her body than Hitchcock could have dared to reveal back in 1960. And the remake is set in the present, so the money Marion impulsively steals from her employer is adjusted for inflation to $400,000 - 10 times the loot of the original. Furthermore, the killing of the snooping private eye, Arbogast, is punctuated by hallucinatory shots which echo aspects of Van Sant's own earlier work rather than anything in Hitchcock. And there are some obvious nods to the homo-erotic imagery of Van Sant's movies, as in the way his camera admiringly follows cinema's all-new, all-hunky Norman Bates - Vince Vaughn - as he climbs a staircase.
These and other diversions from the original register as all the more glaring given Van Sant's self-conscious reworking of the original's production process: adhering to an almost identical shooting script, modelling scene after scene on Hitchock's distinctive style, timing each take to ensure that they ran exactly as long as those shot by Hitchcock, and completing production within the same tight 37-day shooting schedule. And Bernard Herrmann's great, dissonant score is lovingly reproduced by Danny Elfman and an orchestra twice as large as that employed by Herrmann.
Gus Van Sant's Psycho is an exercise that seems dutiful to the point of being pedantic, but ultimately it's a redundant and pointless exercise, more silly than sacrilegious. Times have changed so much in the four decades since Hitchcock's rich, ground-breaking original was first released - when it even made Hollywood studio history for showing a flush toilet on screen. But in setting the new version now and not then, Van Sant has succumbed to a commercial concession without adding any remotely interesting contemporary resonances.
Where Van Sant gets it almost entirely wrong is in the casting of his film. Anne Heche's performance as Marion Crane is all too knowing, one long post-modern wink to the audience. Vince Vaughn looks more like a male model than the gangling, sloppily dressed Norman Bates that Anthony Perkins portrayed, and Vaughn crucially fails to capture the explosive cocktail of menace, confusion and vulnerability which Perkins etched so vividly. The only viewers likely to be either startled or hooked by the narrative twists and turns in Gus Van Sant's Psycho will be that minority unfamiliar with the Hitchcock original from its many television transmissions and cinema reissues. What the remake cannot hope to achieve is the pleasure of experiencing, over and over, the thrill of seeing Hitchcock's classic for the first time, and of tapping into its deeper layers and meanings.
However, as with every misfired adaptation from a far superior source, what matters is that the original still exists in its own right and will survive in all its untrammelled brilliance - long after its imitators, however well-intentioned, are forgotten.
This Is My Father (15) Selected cinemas
Irish cinema-goers may well yawn at the prospect of yet another cinematic expedition into our country's deeply conservative, priest-ridden, patriarchal past, as cued by an elderly fortune teller in This Is My Father when she introduces a series of extended flashbacks with the lines, "The world was different then. It was the summer of 1939 . . . "
Refreshingly, writer-director Paul Quinn's film rises above the cliches of this hackneyed genre to deliver a touching and compelling picture of joyous young love dashed by the forces of oppression and repression at the time. This is a true family film in that it stars Paul Quinn's brother Aidan, features their sister, Marion, in a minor role, and was lit by their cinematographer brother Declan. It opens on a prologue set in present-day Chicago where a middle-aged, world-weary teacher and widower, Kieran Johnson (James Caan), prompted by the discovery of an old photograph, decides to explore his personal history. Accompanied by his teenage nephew (Jacob Tierney), Johnson travels to Ireland where the aforementioned fortune teller (the venerable Moira Deady) tells him a story of first love involving the spirited 17-year-old Fiona Flynn (Moya Farrelly), who would become Johnson's mother.
Aidan Quinn plays the naive, innocent, hard-working orphan and farmhand, Kieran O'Day, the so-called "poorhouse bastard" who becomes involved with Fiona in a relationship which incurs the wrath of her bitter, alcoholic mother, the Widow Flynn (Gina Moxley) and the stern parish priest (Eamonn Morrissey) who studiously patrols the local dance hall when he's not condemning people from the pulpit.
Making an assured directing debut, Paul Quinn demonstrates a firm narrative control and an effective low-key approach to his material, which eschews histrionics and overstatement. His film could have proved all the more involving had he allowed the central story to breathe and grow instead of interrupting it with some quite superfluous narration - and needless cutting back and forward between past and present, to underline the contrast with these freer times in an underdeveloped parallel story of budding romance between Johnson's nephew and a precocious local schoolgirl.
The dramatic core of the film is its emotional period love story, which is beautifully played by Aidan Quinn in a remarkably subtle and affecting performance and the bright, engaging Irish newcomer, Moya Farrelly, who's a true discovery. In a cast littered with cameos, John Cusack has little or no function as a Life photographer and Brendan Gleeson and Pat Shortt are underused for comic relief, while Stephen Rea plays a fire-and-brimstone missionary with chilly relish, and Colm Meaney is entertainingly cast against type as the camp manager of a small guest house.
The Siege (18) General release
"This is the land of opportunity - the opportunity to turn yourself in," warns a gung-ho US army general (played by Bruce Willis on auto-pilot) as he declares martial law in New York city and sets up an internment camp for Arabs in Brooklyn in Edward Zwick's political thriller, The Siege. The city is in a state of siege after cold-blooded Arab terrorist extremists set off a series of bombs in public places - a bus, a Broadway theatre, a school - with catastrophic consequences.
In his third film for Zwick after Courage Under Fire and the excellent Glory, Denzel Washington plays the head of the joint FBI/ NYPD terrorism task force charged with tracking down the terrorists, with Tony Shalhoub as his Lebanese-born Muslim sidekick. Joining them in an uneasy alliance is an undercover CIA agent (Annette Bening) who smokes joints, drinks wine and has sex with a Palestinian informer.
From a quite promising outset The Siege descends into a flaccidly paced thriller populated by stereotypes and confounded by compromises. It has been attacked as insidious and incendiary by Arab-American and Islamic anti-defamation groups. While the movie's politics are shallow and simplistic, it does present the Arab Anti-Defamation League in a positive light; it reflects more poorly on the judgment of women, and its depiction of the US military is truly scary.
(members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Surprisingly, the award for best director at last year's Sundance Film Festival went to newcomer Darren Aronofsky for this muddled, over-ambitious would-be thriller. It features Sean Gullette, who is on screen throughout, in a wholly vacant performance as Max Cohen, a reclusive mathematical genius who has spent years fixated with attempting to decode the numerical pattern he believes is hidden within the seemingly random numbers generated by the stock market. Cohen's escalating paranoia is fuelled when he is pursued by an aggressive Wall Street firm eager to access his mathematical gifts, and by a Kabbalah sect who believe a 216-digit number he arrives at could unlock Hebrew codes and reveal the true name of God. The film takes its title from the symbol which represents the division of a circle's circumference by its diameter - the number, 3.14159 ad infinitum.
Replete with references to early Bunuel, Cronenberg and Lynch, Aronofsky's low-tech movie is shot in a grainy black-and-white scheme, and mostly in the claustrophobic room where Cohen suffers from migraines as he gradually descends into madness. This is monotonous, pretentious cinema which squanders an intriguing premise and it nowhere as clever as it imagines itself to be.
