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  1. Culture
25 January 2013updated 14 Sep 2021 3:38pm

In praise of Anthony Hopkins

The actor's performance in "Hitchcock" is a reminder of just how good he is.

By Ryan Gilbey

Not much love out there for Hitchcock so far. I don’t mean the director, of course. He got plenty last year. But Sacha Gervasi’s film Hitchcock, which weaves a fanciful art-refracted-through-life tale out of the making of Psycho in 1959, has been conspicuous by its absence from the awards nominations. Helen Mirren has had a few nods for her performance as Hitchcock’s wife Alma, but I am surprised to see a complete snub for Anthony Hopkins in the title role. His performance is so good that it demands I adapt a famous advertising slogan which was used in the 1990s to relaunch a breakfast cereal long taken for granted: Have you forgotten how good he is?

Perhaps the movie’s one measly Oscar nomination for make-up is intended as a back-handed compliment: a suggestion that it’s the (highly accomplished) prosthetics work that deserves the acclaim, rather than the performer underneath. The inhibiting power of an extreme physical metamorphosis surely demands a higher than usual level of charisma: in other words, the actor, physically muffled, is going to have to do a lot more projecting than a screen performer might otherwise be called upon to do. Well, Hopkins is your man.

It’s easy to take for granted how magnetic he is, to think that his showboating vaudevillian flourishes are confined to memories of Hannibal Lecter (in The Silence of the Lambs and, less notably, Hannibal and Red Dragon). But his performance in Hitchcock is a good refresher. In keeping with the heightened tone of the film, he plays the persona as much as the man, and maintains a delicious comic knowingness whether taunting journalists at a press launch (“Try the finger sandwiches: they’re real fingers”) or receiving therapy from the killer Ed Gein (the inspiration for Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). As you might have gathered, this is no straight-up biopic but an imaginative doodle in the margins of the history of Psycho. Hopkins is such a nimble performer that he can bring both the lightness of touch required by the material, and the gravitas necessary to make the director more than the sum of his fetishes, foibles and neuroses – to play, in other words, the legend and the man simultaneously. He has the poise, the posture, the lemon-sucking pout, but he has an inner light too.

That the film is frothy and fun should not distract us from noticing that the actor is as impressive here as he was in his finest recent work, Nixon, where his bullishness and swagger in the title role bridged the obvious physical disparity between him and Tricky Dicky; The Silence of the Lambs, where he created with Jodie Foster one of the great (and most perverse) romantic couples in modern cinema; and his achingly inhibited turn as Mr Stevens in The Remains of the Day. And I would also recommend his delicate work alongside Lucy Punch in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger; their scenes are the high-point of a movie which, like Hitchcock, is no less intriguing for being flawed.

Hitchcock opens in the UK on 8 February.

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