PSYCHO-YOU'VE GOT MAIL-PRINCE OF EGYPT
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva RENOVATIONS 'Psycho,' 'You've Got Mail' & 'Prince of Egypt' Hus Van Sant has not only filmed Joseph Stefano's script of Hitchcock's Psycho without rewriting it,...
...Mixed news: Anne Heche has neither Janet Leigh's wonderful body nor her way of making Marion so maternal that she fails to heed the strain of madness within Norman's pathos...
...Macy, with his endearing Howdy Doody face (well-used in Pleasantville), has Potential Victim written all over him...
...It is an image of doom unmatched in any other children's movie...
...The movie's characters suit this dream city...
...For a moment, God is scary...
...As Ephron is honest enough to show, the kids who once went to Ryan's store now ensconce themselves in aisles of the superstore, happily reading or playing board games葉he same sight that greets me every time I visit Borders or Barnes and Noble...
...The Bible must not be rendered innocuous, even when it's adapted for kids...
...The fire of the burning bush leaps forth in fury when Moses pleads his ineptitude as a messenger of God...
...No, I wanted to hate it, because a cartoon version of such a stern, monumental, founding event struck me as not just a bad idea but a cultural affront...
...And it's not as if Hanks is opening a strip joint in Ryan's tidy little neighborhood...
...Tom Hanks is, expectedly, deft and pleasing, yet I kept wishing that Bill Murray had been cast to give the role some real insolence, some edge, so that the hero's emotional warming might be made more dramatic...
...She's a smart cookie who will get another job, and all her employees are either young enough to survive or old enough to retire on sound investments...
...Moses has gone to petition Pharaoh in a temple where the ruler is accompanied by his little son...
...In any event, we can sense the director winking at us...
...Crucially, Vince Vaughn replaces Anthony Perkins's gangliness with thicknecked bluffness and a convincing mask of All-American normality...
...And, since the script hasn't been altered, here is a 1990s adult film without the F word...
...Thus, the speech comes out fresh...
...Hrince of Egypt is just as much an animation remake of Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 The Ten Commandments as it is a retelling of the biblical story...
...A gift to female and gay audience members...
...Are these the private eye's last thoughts before death...
...Is this the first time in a children's movie that God has been made scary...
...But they mean nothing to us, since we haven't been privy to Arbogast's private life...
...Joseph Stefano's screenplay (from Robert Bloch's novel) remains a model of concision in its plotting and a repository of sinister vibrations in its dialogues...
...For example, in the famous opening scene, Hitchcock's camera floated through the window of a hotel room to discover Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in a white bra and half-slip watching her lover put on his clothes after their lunchhour tryst...
...The divine voice thunders, "Who hath made man's mouth?...have not I, the Lord...
...The boy Moses and his adoptive brother, Rameses, hot rod in their chariots as if they were auditioning for a Roger Corman biker movie {The Wild Pharaohs...
...This is epitomized in one shot...
...Some of these innovations don't work so well: as the detective Arbogast is slashed to death, Van Sant inserts some nearly subliminal shots of a ghostly nude woman and an equally ghostly winding road...
...But Rameses, the upholder of tradition, sinks into the culture of death that has spawned him...
...But, let's face it, though Vaughn is excellent, Perkins was beyond excellence: he made neurosis mythic and added an unusual and unusually appealing monster to the American Gothic landscape...
...Commonweal 21 January 29,1999 Hou've Got Mail is based on Ernst Lubitsch's heartwarming yet candid 1940 movie, The Shop around the Corner, one of the few Hollywood films that really captures the European flavor of their settings, in this case the economically depressed Budapest of the early thirties...
...You know these two are made for each other but you have to wait two-and-a-quarter hours for them to find out...
...As Marion's lover, Viggo Mortensen is not at his best here but his virile surliness has more to offer than anything the Arrow-shirt-model-posing-asan-actor John Gavin could provide...
...What will strike the rest of the audience is the difference the new cast makes, and it's precisely here that we encounter the real superiorities and inferiorities of this remake...
...And Meg Ryan is never so cute as when she's sassing the capitalist who loves her...
...To be sure, the film is sometimes egregious...
...The animators and scriptwriters have not turned the story into a relativistic, multicultural, chicken-soup-for-the-soul smarmy mess...
...Moses stands on one side of a wall painting which depicts the drowning of the Hebrew babies while Pharaoh stands opposite him...
...This, too, should be appropriate, but since Hanks has been making puppydog eyes at Ryan for over half the movie while she keeps snapping, "Sorry, gotta go now," the audience may feel less rebirth than relief at the final embrace...
...Zipporah is turned into a swashbuckling tomboy along the lines of Esmeralda in Disney's Hunchback, as if biblical women were not already strong enough to please feminists...
...The pictures of the falling, drowning babies seem to tumble onto the head of the real child, seem to make him the inheritor of their destruction...
...Commonweal 22 January 29,1999...
...No, they have used the plot device lifted from DeMille葉he early brotherhood of Rameses and Moses turning into epic enmity葉o present a concept to children that is by now almost alien to our culture, though it is one of the central themes of the Bible: the persistence of an evil so deep that it visits itself upon the young and innocent...
...Moses, at first as proud to be a prince of Egypt as his brother, breaks with his past when he learns of the slaughter of the innocents from which he was saved...
...The tycoon-hero (Tom Hanks), whose Borderstype super bookstore threatens to drive the heroine's children's bookstore out of business, is basically a nice guy even before he falls in love...
...Yet one overriding comparison kept infiltrating my odious mind: Lubitsch's film was full of pain and fear of poverty, and these emotions somehow made the comedy funnier and the final triumph of love sweeter...
...I think the sight of Leigh in dishabille jump-started the puberty of many a pre-adolescent boy like myself, but Van Sant's camera treats his Marion, Anne Heche, like the most gallant of peeping toms by staying pretty much above her collarbone...
...Yes, Meg wants to save her little enterprise from rich wolves, but she is so trim, so modestly soignee, so unremittingly nice that even President Clinton couldn't detect her pain, much less feel it...
...SCREEN Richard Alleva RENOVATIONS 'Psycho,' 'You've Got Mail' & 'Prince of Egypt' Hus Van Sant has not only filmed Joseph Stefano's script of Hitchcock's Psycho without rewriting it, he's reproduced nearly all of the staging as well...
...You've Got Mail is bright, too bright, funny, self-congratulatory in its funniness, sharp, and so hip that the sharpness goes to work on your teeth...
...Bernard Herrmann's score, now Wagnerized by Danny Elfman, is still like hearing the action accompanied by lightning...
...Her lover, however, is displayed in full dorsal nudity...
...He's happy to chaperone his little half-brother and niece on weekend excursions...
...The new shrink, Robert Forster, takes it slowly and ploddingly and makes you feel that the doctor himself is rather surprised by his own conclusions...
...The bad news: Bill Macy, fine actor though he is and certainly competent here, does not radiate the assurance Martin Balsam employed as the detective to lull the audience into thinking that this man will put everything to rights, a lull that is shockingly exploded in the second murder scene...
...Between the two men and below the painting stands the firstborn Egyptian prince...
...Alas, I'm unable to use them...
...Simon Oakland, the original psychiatrist, made the final summarizing speech sound so glib that the movie suddenly lurched into satire...
...Nearly, because what may be most interesting to viewers who know the original well is the way Van Sant has sneaked in minute differences within several shots and scenes, mischievously tweaking our memories of the 1960 classic without changing the story...
...Especially not then...
...The Ephrons let their plot shuffle on into springtime, the season of rebirth...
...So I was storing up venomous remarks even before I entered the theater...
...The Ephrons have invented so much for their remake that they should feel justified in regarding comparisons as odious...
...Lubitsch's writer, Samson Raphaelson, structured his script so that the prickly lovers come together at Christmas, the season of good will...
...The people at Dreamworks have done the right thing, though they may be punished at the box office...
...Not lightning as the prelude to thunder but as the deadly force already zigging through your body...
...I was prepared to hate this movie...
...When Ryan works her facial muscles trying to achieve intensity, the audience may feel quite another kind of pain...
...The good news: Julianne Moore makes Marion's sister gutsy, attractive, and infinitely preferable to the drab Vera Miles of 1960...
...Yet the film moved me...
...In a way, this makes the new Norman even more frightening than Perkins's, as if one of the Beach Boys had morphed into Charles Manson...
...And the Stephen Schwartz score is, by and large, dreadful...
...And is the Passover scene容erily presenting a mist that follows Egyptian children into their houses to kill them葉he first expressly meant to show children that the ways of God can be not only mysterious but downright stomach-churning...
...The script by Phoebe and Nora Ephron (which Nora directed) has used only one of the strands of the original plot (a young man and woman using pen names court each other by mail揺ere e-mail溶ot realizing they already know and loathe each other), and has relocated it to Rudy Giuliani's new, tourist-friendly, family-friendly New York City: street fairs for children, all bars are called Starbucks, and not a beggar or hooker in sight...
...But Heche has something that almost compensates: a pertness, an elfin wit that is interesting here but would be better employed in a screwball comedy, if only screwball comedies were made any more...
...In the new movie, nothing is as stake, nothing hurts, nothing matters...
...Such details are strictly for connoisseurs of the old Psycho...
...Again and again, the animators and writers refuse to pull punches, refuse to make the biblical story saccharine...
...By being a dutiful heir, he dooms his own heir...
Vol. 126 • January 1999 • No. 2
