Originality the victim in 1998 remake of film 'Psycho'
By Tam Notosusanto
JAKARTA (JP): The 1998 film Psycho looks very familiar. It is remarkably similar to... the 1960 film Psycho. In fact, it's way too similar.
This should be understandable though given Hollywood's current addiction to recycled cinema. Nowadays, they're remaking movies left and right from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, as well as from outside America. All of it for the sake of reinterpreting and retouching movies, while making poignant, classic material accessible to the MTV crowd, who may be allergic to subtitles and demand more colors on screen than just black and white.
But with the new Psycho, movie remakes have gone one step further... or backward, for that matter. It was probably supposed to be a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, whose work has been the basis of remake after remake (latest reincarnations: A Perfect Murder, the revamped Dial M for Murder; and the TV flick Rear Window). Some kind of tribute. There's really no reinterpretation here, no reworking, no retouching, and no suspense or excitement, either.
The remade Psycho is actually a shot-by-shot reenactment of the 38-year-old classic. Joseph Stefano's ingenious screenplay, adapted from Robert Bloch's novel, is completely retained, telling the story of Marion Crane (Anne Heche), a real estate company employee who runs away with a client's money. She goes on a guilt trip, leaving her home in Phoenix with thousands of dollars in cash, en route to join her boyfriend, Sam (Viggo Mortensen).
But she is tragically stopped when she decides to spend one night at a motel owned by a lone, peculiar young man, Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn) who lives with his unseen and domineering mother.
With the story twists, the shocking murder scenes and the clever plot, the film is pure pleasure. Especially with Bernard Herrmann's memorable score reused, down to the ee! ee! ee! sound as the knife slashes. And Hitchcock's innovative camera work is duplicated as well: the ceiling shots, the zooming out of the lifeless eye all add a stylish touch to the picture.
And that is where the real mystery lies: why should they bother making a 99 percent celluloid Xerox? The other 1 percent being the contemporary look that replaces the 1960 setup.
When they wanted to redo Psycho, they really redid it. Only this time the screams are on a multiple-track Dolby Digital system and the blood, for a change, is red.
Too bad they couldn't bring Anthony Perkins back from the dead, or rejuvenate Janet Leigh. Instead, they have rising stars Vince Vaughn as Hollywood's most infamous motel owner and Anne Heche as his most unfortunate guest. For this film, casting director Howard Feuer has incidentally come up with reunions of at least three pairs of actors: William H. Macy and Julianne Moore (from Boogie Nights), Moore and Vaughn (from The Lost World: Jurassic Park) and Vaughn and Heche (from Return to Paradise).
Although Feuer made the clever choice of casting Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster as Hannibal Lechter and Clarice Starling, respectively, this time he made a less wiser selection. Sure, we have fine actors here: Macy, Moore and even Viggo Mortensen, for the second time cast in a remake of a Hitchcock movie after A Perfect Murder. But the whole film relies on the playing of Norman Bates, and this is where the film becomes most annoying.
Vaughn apparently cannot dust off his cool-cat persona from Swingers, and his happy, beaming face, with his perfect, athletic physique, is all wrong for the broken down, emotionally unstable Norman.
But here's the biggest mystery of all: Gus Van Sant directed this remake.
That the exquisite mind behind such brilliant independent films like Drugstore Cowboy and My Old Private Idaho and superb mainstream pictures such as To Die For and Good Will Hunting would allow himself to be involved in this fiasco is more tragic than Marion Crane's last shower.
The new Psycho has some good stuff in it, but they're all borrowed from the original masterpiece.
Unless you have seen the original Psycho or are too curious to care anyway, this is a film you'd better simply stay away from. There's nothing refreshing about it except for a sentence which comes in the closing credits: "Thank you to John Woo for his kitchen knife."