De Palma's Obsession

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This movie made me want to scratch my eyes out at times. And then De Palma would inject his usual diabolical creepiness to the proceedings, and it'd win me back So, all in all, it was the usual De Palma movie-watching experience.

First off, the bad: I realize that it was Bernard Hermann ripping off his own score for Vertigo here, but JESUS CHRIST. The score was so completely distracting and overwhelming at times, especially because I've listened to the Vertigo score so often in my life (really there is nothing better to clean the house to) that when Hermann would change a note here and there to make this score "different" it made me want to turn the sound off and just play the Vertigo CD alongside the film. It hurt me physically to hear this "score but not the score".

And Cliff Robertson should have never been cast as a lead in anything. I can't think of having seen Robertson anywhere besides as Spiderman's Uncle, but ohmigod he was awful. I get that De Palma was probably directing him to be as blank a slate as possible, a la Jimmy Stewart's Vertigo or Rear Window performances where half the films are Stewart just looking at things, but Stewart injected so much into those reaction shots, while Robertson was just not even registering.

I do think De Palma was trying to explicitly mess with this (and many other) Hitch conventions, specifically in these static "looking shots" where Robertson was wearing sunglasses - a shot of someone watching something out of frame while wearing sunglasses so you can't see their eyes is a pretty big fuck you to the audience - and this is presumably what De Palma was going for, so this might not have been Robertson's fault entirely, but it just got to be so completely off-putting.

It did remind me of Hitch's "hero" in Frenzy, though, where the inherent creepiness of a Hitch leading man became explicit and just completely overwhelmed the story and made the entire experience nearly unbearable. See, yes, Hitch's leading fellas are always flawed guys, but they're Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant, so you tend to like them, you understand them, even when they're total creeps. I mean, is there a bigger creep than Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, when you think about it? Yet somehow you're with him. Not so with Jon Finch in Frenzy, though (a film I've almost always found unbearably ugly to sit through) and not here with Robertson. So yeah, there's something interesting about making the leading man as explicitly creepy as he inherently is, about taking away that layer of audience identification we have inherently with Stewart or Grant; but to what end? What's a Hitch movie without the bubbling charm? Right - a De Palma movie!


But I speak too harshly, because there was good, and plenty of it, enough to warrant a B- from me over there at the side. As always with De Palma, the film was gorgeous, a visual buffet of shots swiped from Hitch but filtered through De Palma's gauzy 70's lens. And this was fun - when the soundtrack wasn't drowning you - to spot the Hitch shots, and remember what they were from - the crane shot down from the ceiling to a small item in someone's hand (stolen from Notorious); the frantic desktop duel with scissors being wielded in the glow of lamplight (stolen from Dial M For Murder); and the endless (to the point of too much and then back again) series of shots and sequences swiped from Vertigo.

And I really enjoyed Geneviève Bujold's performance, which, to quote the boyfriend, "She's doing all the acting for everybody." She got it, she was having fun, and occasionally knocking her teeth against the scenery. It's in these moments, when you watch her or Melanie Griffith in Body Double or Angie Dickensen in Dressed to Kill or Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface or Sissy Spacek in Carrie (I could go on) that you know you can call bullshit on the claims of misogyny often levelled at De Palma - he loves women, and he gives them great juicy things to work with, even if his films are primarily (besides Carrie) male-centric. Because in his world of male protagonists, the Sun is always a woman that the entire film is spinning around, and she's always the most fascinating thing to watch.

And I have to say, I dug the unexpected twist the proceedings took about 3/4 of the way through, and the way it colored everything with an even deeper layer of complete creepiness. That ending shot was a world of shudders.
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