Psycho (Gus van Sant), 1998
The chief question running through reviews of Gus van Sant’s remake of Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho has been a simple one: Why? The suggested answer has often been a cynical one: the film was financed as an easy way to cash in on the continuing popularity of horror movies and utilise the Psycho trademark now that the sequels have run their course. The response from most critics ranged from bewilderment to contempt.
I have little doubt that the executives who greenlighted the picture had nothing but easy profits on their mind. But the director was the critically admired Gus van Sant, and I’m not sure his motives can be so casually disparaged. In fact, coming off the Oscar-nominated and commercially successful Good Will Hunting, he had a lot to lose by making this picture. There was obviously something that interested him about the project.
Van Sant’s approach is, as far as I know, pretty much unprecedented. Plenty have remade Hitchcock before (include Hitch himself, with the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much), but van Sant has chosen to remake the film virtually shot for shot. I say “virtually” because it’s not an exact remake. The cast has changed, obviously, and the film is in colour. Some technical changes have been introduced that Hitchcock probably would have used had they been available in 1960: van Sant has converted Hitchcock’s opening series of dissolves into an unbroken flyover of the city, for example. Other shots have been reorganised, or the action staged differently, and there are few miscellaneous inserts added for effect. One or two lines of dialogue have been changed. And the sex and violence has become marginally more overt. Yet for the most part, this film is indeed a shot by shot remake – almost a rephotographing. (In a sense, you could say it ranks as one of the most elaborate colorisation jobs ever attempted).
So if you’re interested purely in what a remake brings to the material that’s new, there probably isn’t much to interest you here. I don’t know that I could say the film is successful, as such. But I did find it fascinating. Van Sant’s approach really confounds the usual discussion of a remake, which typically concentrates on:
a) What the remake brings that is new; and
b) How much the qualities of the original have been retained.
There is an underlying assumption behind this, which is that the only point in remaking a film is to add something original to transform the material. A remake is then usually judged successful if it can do so without losing those qualities that made the first version special (ie, maximising point A above without overly jeopardising point B).
By adding so little that is his own, van Sant completely screws up any attempt to study the film in these terms. Instead of bringing his own sensibility to the material, he’s deliberately hiding it. So in a sense the Psycho remake is deliberately avoiding becoming a work of the cinema in its own right. Instead it becomes more of an interpretation, or revisiting of, Hitchcock’s original. More than most remakes, it’s a chance to look at a classic film and answer some of the questions fans will often mull over. Things like: What made it special? What would it be like if it came out today? Who would you cast in it? Could their performances match those in the original? What would you change? What would you leave the same? What would it be like in colour, and with modern special effects?
Van Sant has taken such idle fanboy speculation and provided a possible answer, though whether this was a worthwhile use of his talent is a moot point. I frankly don’t get some of the changes, most notably the “subliminal” inserts during the shower scene and the killing of Arbogast. (Unless van Sant is saying that if made today, Psycho would have been far more pretentious). The film still works in much the same way: the script hasn’t got any less clever in the last thirty nine years, and the shower scene is still disturbing in the way it implicates us in Mother’s crime. And there are new pleasures; William H. Macy, replacing Martin Balsam as Arbogast, is particularly fun to watch. Arbogast is just as merciless in his interrogations as before, but the scenes now play like a reversal of Fargo, with Macy in Frances McDormand’s role. Julianne Moore is also good as Lila, Marion’s sister.
If there’s a disappointment, it’s Vince Vaughn as Norman. There are few tougher roles to step into, of course. Norman is an inherently tough role, and it was one that Anthony Perkins made his own in a way that few actors ever have. But Vaughn doesn’t really ever find the right note for the part. He never makes you like him the way Perkins did – perhaps deliberately, he is played as the menacing psycho right from the start. Physically, too, he’s much bigger than Anne Heche, who plays Marion. So rather than the mirror symmetry Hitchcock created in his shots of the pair, he’s hulking over Heche so much it’s a wonder she ever accepts his invitation into the parlour. Once there he giggles and glowers alternately, giving the game away from the start. It’s hard to imagine how this scene could work for somebody new to Psycho. (Indeed, I’m sure it doesn’t: I was talking to a friend who saw this but had never seen the original. I asked her what she thought. She said: “It sucked… Is it true it’s exactly the same as the first version?”)
The part is played so differently to the way Perkins did it that I suspect it must be deliberate. Probably van Sant and/or Vaughn thought that Bates wouldn’t work for the Scream generation: because we’ll work out who Mother is, they might as well make Norman more overtly frightening (a misguided view, but possible nonetheless). But if you accept that the film is meant to function more as a game with the original, there’s another way to see it. Maybe the performance is intentionally bad (or at least campy) to highlight just how special Perkins was in the part.
Oh yeah, okay – dumb idea. But I do look forward to seeing Moore in van Sant’s 2021 remake of Psycho II.