Marion Crane (Anne Heche), a young, unhappy woman, steals $400,000 and leaves her old life behind, hoping the money can solve her boyfriend’s (Viggo Mortensen) financial problems, and maybe give her a future. During a storm, she stops at The Bates Motel, run by Norman (Vince Vaughn) for his invalid mother. Soon, Marion’s sister, Lila (Julianne Moore), and Detective Milton Arbogast (William H. Macy) are looking for her.
For those of you who missed the hoopla, this 1998 release is Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock genre-defining classic, Psycho. The question raised by…well, everyone, was: why? Hitchcock’s movie was a masterpiece. Apparently Van Sant knew this, because you don’t make a shot-by-shot remake of slop. But if he knew it was a masterpiece, why touch it at all? I suppose I could scream about that all day and not come any closer to making sense of it. I’ll just assume that Van Sant and several executives at Universal had their brains break, and with broken brains, they did foolish things.
OK, so besides being pointless, was Pyscho 98 any good? That answer is easy; No. Oh, there are plenty of worse films out there, and Van Sant had a master to steal from so the basic shots are good. But there is no tension, and no sympathy. Some of the failings are due to the actors. Heche manages meek, and not much else, so anything that happens to her doesn’t engage me. Far worse is Vaughn, who dumps Perkin’s complex portrayal in favor of a generic nutball Slasher killer. It was never clear what Perkin’s Norman would do, but there is no such ambiguity with Vaughn’s. At least Viggo Mortensen is no worse than the original’s John Gavins as the boyfriend, though he tends to draw too much attention to himself. The only unqualified success is William H. Macy as the obnoxious detective.
The very few changes that Van Sant does make are all wrong. He is able to put in sexuality that Hitchcock could not, so what does he give us? Well, there’s a shot of Mortensen’s butt in a scene that should be about desperation and loss. Then we’re given Norman masturbating (with shulurping sound effects that imply he walks around with a pound of KY-Jelly down his pants) while he peeps in at Marian. This should be a creepy moment, but with Vaughn vibrating to the shulurp, shulurp, shulurp, it becomes low comedy. Strangely, where a touch of nudity would have helped, for Marian in the shower, creating more vulnerability while using yet another approach to get the audience’s blood pumping, Van Sant skips it.
The events in the film have been moved to modern times (meaning 1998), which makes the ’50s/’60s style dialog and out of date sensibilities incongruous. And then there is the color. That is the fundamental, structural change. Is that the sole reason for this remake? I think everyone realizes that computer colorization of old B&W films didn’t work out well, but if it was simply a matter of needing a colorized version, then dropping a few million on advancing the field and then colorizing the original would have been a better use of resources. Sure it would have resulted in an inferior film to the B&W version, but it would still have Leigh, Perkins, and Hitchcock, making it far better than this. (Of course I realize it isn’t about color. It’s about money.) To make matters worse, nothing of interest is done with the color. There are no subtle shadings to suggest that something is wrong. No sickly greens or drab yellows. Color can create a dark and troubling mood even more effectively than B&W (Body Heat is a prime example). But not here.
While not the only shot-for-shot remake (the 1952 The Prisoner of Zenda matched the 1937 version in the same way), the 1998 Pyscho is a curiosity that proves that film is a collaborative art form defined not by a particular shot, but by every aspect of a project and created by every person involved. In 1960, all the pieces were in place. In 1998, not nearly enough of them were.