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Review - The Girl (2012)
This TV movie (BBC/HBO) examines the relationship between cinematic legend Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) and one of his famous blonde leading ladies, in this instance Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller), Hedren was the star of two of his movies, The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964), before their working relationship became damaged to the extent that she preferred to end her Hollywood career rather than work with him again. Tippi Hedren was interviewed during the collaborative process (screenplay by Gwyneth Hughes), but the original source material was Donald Spoto's Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (2009)
Former model, turned actress, Sienna Miller plays the former model, turned actress, Tippi Hedren, in a tricky acting assignment. She must capture Hedren's character both off screen (confident) and on-screen (terrified), as well as maintaining Hedren's claims as to the nature of her former relationship with 'Hitch'. Happily for all concerned Miller turns in an excellent performance and was deserving of a Best Actress nomination at the 2013 Golden Globes. Unfortunately for Toby Jones, his performance is hamstrung by these same claims : that Hitchcock was a lecher, a sexual predator and lacked charisma. This portrayal did not ring true : there are far too many witnesses, including all of his other leading ladies, who take an opposite approach.
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The movie works best when we are on set with the characters, and especially during the main course The Birds, a strong candidate for Hitchcock's greatest movie. Miller shows Hedren's determination to complete the movie, despite the barriers Hitchcock throws her way, which culminates in a re-enactment of the famous attic scene from The Birds, where the character Melanie Daniels gets trapped and is attacked by a variety of birds. When Hitchcock announces that mechanical birds are not really going to 'do the trick', you understand that his leading actress is in for a bad day at the office! Both Hedren and Miller had live birds thrown at them during the original and re-enacted attic scene. Hedren's version of events is that Hitchcock shot the scene 40 times before wrapping it, as a retaliation for Hedren rejecting his sexual advances.
The supporting cast has little to do as the shorter running time required for a TV movie meant there were only a few scenes with Imelda Staunton as Alma Reville and we didn't see any actor attempting Sean Connery's movie husband when the set switched from The Birds to Marnie. By now Jones as Hitchcock was fast becoming an irritation...indeed when Tippi Hedren saw the finished movie, she was disappointed that the film had concentrated too much on the negative aspects of Hitchcock's character. This error was not repeated with the big screen release of Hitchcock a month or two later, starring Anthony Hopkins, which had a more realistic portrayal of the famous director : sometimes neurotic, sometimes brilliant, elitist or obsessive, but always humanistic. This error is The Girl's major weakness. It isn't very long before you lose all sympathy for the Toby Jones character, and despite a super performance from Sienna Miller, you eventually lose sympathy for her too. The claim in the credits that Marnie is widely held to be Hitchcock's final masterpiece may appease Tippi Hedren, but the far superior Frenzy was made in Britain, some eight years later.
6/10 Hard to credit
Review written by John Franklin : February 2013
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