Gus Van Sant has not only filmed Joseph Stefano’s script of Hitchcock’s Psycho without rewriting it, he’s reproduced nearly all of the staging as well. Nearly, because what may be most interesting to viewers who know the original well is the way Van Sant has sneaked in minute differences within several shots and scenes, mischievously tweaking our memories of the 1960 classic without changing the story.
For example, in the famous opening scene, Hitchcock’s camera floated through the window of a hotel room to discover Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in a white bra and half-slip watching her lover put on his clothes after their lunch-hour tryst. I think the sight of Leigh in dishabille jump-started the puberty of many a pre-adolescent boy like myself, but Van Sant’s camera treats his Marion, Anne Heche, like the most gallant of peeping toms by staying pretty much above her collarbone. Her lover, however, is displayed in full dorsal nudity. A gift to female and gay audience members? In any event, we can sense the director winking at us.
Some of these innovations don’t work so well: as the detective Arbogast is slashed to death, Van Sant inserts some nearly subliminal shots of a ghostly nude woman and an equally ghostly winding road. Are these the private eye’s last thoughts before death? But they mean nothing to us, since we haven’t been privy to Arbogast’s private life.
Such details are strictly for connoisseurs of the old Psycho. What will strike the rest of the audience is the difference the new cast makes, and it’s precisely here that we encounter the real superiorities and inferiorities of this remake.
The good news: Julianne Moore makes Marion’s sister gutsy, attractive, and infinitely preferable to the drab Vera Miles of 1960. As Marion’s lover, Viggo Mortensen is not at his best here but his virile surliness has more to offer than anything the Arrow-shirt-model-posing-as-an-actor John Gavin could provide. Simon Oakland, the original psychiatrist, made the final summarizing speech sound so glib that the movie suddenly lurched into satire. The new shrink, Robert Forster, takes it slowly and ploddingly and makes you feel that the doctor himself is rather surprised by his own conclusions. Thus, the speech comes out fresh.
The bad news: Bill Macy, fine actor though he is and certainly competent here, does not radiate the assurance Martin Balsam employed as the detective to lull the audience into thinking that this man will put everything to rights, a lull that is shockingly exploded in the second murder scene. Macy, with his endearing Howdy Doody face (well-used in Pleasantville), has Potential Victim written all over him.
Mixed news: Anne Heche has neither Janet Leigh’s wonderful body nor her way of making Marion so maternal that she fails to heed the strain of madness within Norman’s pathos. But Heche has something that almost compensates: a pertness, an elfin wit that is interesting here but would be better employed in a screwball comedy, if only screwball comedies were made any more.
Crucially, Vince Vaughn replaces Anthony Perkins’s gangliness with thick-necked bluffness and a convincing mask of All-American normality. In a way, this makes the new Norman even more frightening than Perkins’s, as if one of the Beach Boys had morphed into Charles Manson. But, let’s face it, though Vaughn is excellent, Perkins was beyond excellence: he made neurosis mythic and added an unusual and unusually appealing monster to the American Gothic landscape.
Joseph Stefano’s screenplay (from Robert Bloch’s novel) remains a model of concision in its plotting and a repository of sinister vibrations in its dialogues. And, since the script hasn’t been altered, here is a 1990s adult film without the F word. Bernard Herrmann’s score, now Wagnerized by Danny Elfman, is still like hearing the action accompanied by lightning. Not lightning as the prelude to thunder but as the deadly force already zigging through your body.
You’ve Got Mail is based on Ernst Lubitsch’s heartwarming yet candid 1940 movie, The Shop around the Corner, one of the few Hollywood films that really captures the European flavor of their settings, in this case the economically depressed Budapest of the early thirties. The script by Phoebe and Nora Ephron (which Nora directed) has used only one of the strands of the original plot (a young man and woman using pen names court each other by mail—here e-mail—not realizing they already know and loathe each other), and has relocated it to Rudy Giuliani’s new, tourist-friendly, family-friendly New York City: street fairs for children, all bars are called Starbucks, and not a beggar or hooker in sight. The movie’s characters suit this dream city. The tycoon-hero (Tom Hanks), whose Borders-type super bookstore threatens to drive the heroine’s children’s bookstore out of business, is basically a nice guy even before he falls in love. (He’s happy to chaperone his little half-brother and niece on weekend excursions.) And Meg Ryan is never so cute as when she’s sassing the capitalist who loves her. You know these two are made for each other but you have to wait two-and-a-quarter hours for them to find out.
The Ephrons have invented so much for their remake that they should feel justified in regarding comparisons as odious. Yet one overriding comparison kept infiltrating my odious mind: Lubitsch’s film was full of pain and fear of poverty, and these emotions somehow made the comedy funnier and the final triumph of love sweeter. In the new movie, nothing is as stake, nothing hurts, nothing matters. Yes, Meg wants to save her little enterprise from rich wolves, but she is so trim, so modestly soignée, so unremittingly nice that even President Clinton couldn’t detect her pain, much less feel it. (When Ryan works her facial muscles trying to achieve intensity, the audience may feel quite another kind of pain.) She’s a smart cookie who will get another job, and all her employees are either young enough to survive or old enough to retire on sound investments. And it’s not as if Hanks is opening a strip joint in Ryan’s tidy little neighborhood. As Ephron is honest enough to show, the kids who once went to Ryan’s store now ensconce themselves in aisles of the superstore, happily reading or playing board games—the same sight that greets me every time I visit Borders or Barnes and Noble.
Tom Hanks is, expectedly, deft and pleasing, yet I kept wishing that Bill Murray had been cast to give the role some real insolence, some edge, so that the hero’s emotional warming might be made more dramatic. Lubitsch’s writer, Samson Raphaelson, structured his script so that the prickly lovers come together at Christmas, the season of good will. The Ephrons let their plot shuffle on into springtime, the season of rebirth. This, too, should be appropriate, but since Hanks has been making puppy-dog eyes at Ryan for over half the movie while she keeps snapping, "Sorry, gotta go now, " the audience may feel less rebirth than relief at the final embrace. You’ve Got Mail is bright, too bright, funny, self-congratulatory in its funniness, sharp, and so hip that the sharpness goes to work on your teeth.
Prince of Egypt is just as much an animation remake of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments as it is a retelling of the biblical story.
I was prepared to hate this movie. No, I wanted to hate it, because a cartoon version of such a stern, monumental, founding event struck me as not just a bad idea but a cultural affront. So I was storing up venomous remarks even before I entered the theater.
Alas, I’m unable to use them. To be sure, the film is sometimes egregious. The boy Moses and his adoptive brother, Rameses, hot rod in their chariots as if they were auditioning for a Roger Corman biker movie (The Wild Pharaohs?). Zipporah is turned into a swashbuckling tomboy along the lines of Esmeralda in Disney’s Hunchback, as if biblical women were not already strong enough to please feminists. And the Stephen Schwartz score is, by and large, dreadful.
Yet the film moved me. The animators and scriptwriters have not turned the story into a relativistic, multicultural, chicken-soup-for-the-soul smarmy mess. No, they have used the plot device lifted from DeMille—the early brotherhood of Rameses and Moses turning into epic enmity—to present a concept to children that is by now almost alien to our culture, though it is one of the central themes of the Bible: the persistence of an evil so deep that it visits itself upon the young and innocent. Moses, at first as proud to be a prince of Egypt as his brother, breaks with his past when he learns of the slaughter of the innocents from which he was saved. But Rameses, the upholder of tradition, sinks into the culture of death that has spawned him. By being a dutiful heir, he dooms his own heir.
This is epitomized in one shot. Moses has gone to petition Pharaoh in a temple where the ruler is accompanied by his little son. Moses stands on one side of a wall painting which depicts the drowning of the Hebrew babies while Pharaoh stands opposite him. Between the two men and below the painting stands the firstborn Egyptian prince. The pictures of the falling, drowning babies seem to tumble onto the head of the real child, seem to make him the inheritor of their destruction. It is an image of doom unmatched in any other children’s movie.
Again and again, the animators and writers refuse to pull punches, refuse to make the biblical story saccharine. The fire of the burning bush leaps forth in fury when Moses pleads his ineptitude as a messenger of God. The divine voice thunders, "Who hath made man’s mouth?...have not I, the Lord?" For a moment, God is scary. Is this the first time in a children’s movie that God has been made scary? And is the Passover scene—eerily presenting a mist that follows Egyptian children into their houses to kill them—the first expressly meant to show children that the ways of God can be not only mysterious but downright stomach-churning?
The people at Dreamworks have done the right thing, though they may be punished at the box office. The Bible must not be rendered innocuous, even when it’s adapted for kids. Especially not then.
Related: The Catholic Hitchcock: A Director's Sense of Good and Evil, by Richard Alleva
