Family Plot

I'm intrigued by the idea of an artist getting to write their final chapter. There are so many bands and directors and writers whose final works were never intended to be that. When an artist is afforded to the opportunity, it's interesting to see what they do with it. Do they turn it into an epitaph? The culmination of their life's work? Or do they stay the course, business as usual? I don't know if Alfred Hitchcock intended for Family Plot to be his swan song, but it sure feels that way. The circumstances were right; he'd had a heart attack a year before production began. People associated with the production said he seemed tired. He was in his mid-70's. His output had slowed tremendously, and his last several movies were not met with the enthusiastic response of his imperial phase. And the movie business was in the middle of its New Hollywood phase; old directors and studio governance was being pushed aside in favor of the auteur, grounding cinema in gritty realism and eschewing traditions. Hitch had all the reason in the world to make Family Plot his goodbye and fade quietly into the role of the retired elder statesman. But what kind of goodbye would it be? In typical Hitchcock fashion, which is to say defiant and refusing to play by anyone's rules, he went out in the weirdest way possible: by paying reverence to, while poking fun at, himself. Family Plot plays out like a trip down memory lane, a look back on his filmography, lightly taking the piss on himself. The plot -- about a fake medium who gets wrapped up in the search for a missing heir who turns out to be a kidnapper and murderer -- takes beats from so many of his movies. There's the heist/caper element of To Catch A Thief. A bickering couple (two of them!) like The Lady Vanishes. The charming, suave sociopath of Shadow of a Doubt. A kidnapping from the original The Man Who Knew Too Much. A Hitchcock blonde from at least a quarter of his catalog. But all of these elements are turned on their heads; the Hitchcock blonde is a woman in a wig, and whether this is just fantastic coincidence or intentional, is played by Karen Black. Get it? Black, the opposite of blonde? The kidnappings are done peacefully and respectfully, giving the victim maximum comfort. The bickering couple (Barbara Harris as the fake psychic Blanche and Bruce Dern as her beleaguered boyfriend George) are lower class, Blanche is eternally horny, and George is always on the run, but in a chasing way instead of being chased. Many of the classic tropes and tendencies are flipped on their head, lovingly of course, just so Hitchcock can be contrarian and get some comedic mileage out of them. It's almost like he's saying to New Hollywood "breaking with tradition isn't a skill, anybody can do it, even this old man" ... which is hilarious when he then uses antiquated techniques like rear projection in car scenes. There is, paradoxically, a feeling of both casualness and exhaustion to Family Plot's production. Even though we find out exactly how ruthless William Devane's Arthur can be, he's never as menacing as, say, the killers in Rope or the husband in Dial M For Murder. The protagonists are only the heroes by way of positioning; Blanche's medium act is definitively a scam, and George often does scouting to provide her with information to perpetuate it. Their interest in finding the missing heir isn't to reunite a family and give an old woman peace of mind in her twilight years, it's the $10,000 payoff they've been promised for doing the job. For all the times Hitchcock attempted outright comedy, he never cracked the code before this; Mr. & Mrs. Smith is mean-spirited, and The Trouble With Harry is too casual and lacks a straight man. Family Plot finally showed he could do a comedy if he just let himself go and have some fun. There is some wonderful humor here; the scene where Blanche and George are in an out of control car barreling down a winding mountain road is a stroke of comedic genius. But there's another cutting edge to this blade, and that's the exhaustion of it. Being light and breezy can lapse into weightlessness if one doesn't be careful, and I think that's where Hitch's tiredness shows itself. Ocean's Eleven feels like it has higher stakes than this. Family Plot is not quite a screwball comedy, but it's sure wearing some of its trappings. That comedic car sequence I mentioned is funny, but the comedy goes on for so long, it saps the danger out of the moment. Hitch didn't just crack the nut on the comedy, he cut down the tree; there is almost no danger or tension to be found here. Then again, maybe that was the intention? The whole movie is him giving himself a poke in the ribs. When Karen Black puts on the blonde wig, she doesn't just play the standard icy Hitchcock Blonde, she becomes one that is carried to comedic extremes; her introduction has her face covered in ridiculously large sunglasses and refusing to speak with the police, communicating only in gestures. She's not just icy, she's frozen. Bruce Dern's everyman character isn't just that way because he's in a protagonist's role; he's a cab driver, and he and Blanche are always on the precipice of not being able to afford to eat. Instead of capitalizing and highlighting the location like Hitchcock normally did, he purposefully kept it ambiguous, removing road signs and obscuring the state name on license plates. The movie literally ends with finding the Macguffin in a preposterous way that shatters the movie's rules, and then the character looks at the camera and winks. Family Plot is two hours of Hitchcock celebrating himself by mocking himself. It's a roast in cinematic form, and it's self-inflicted. If he's gonna do that, how can I get mad at it? Family Plot is not going to be everyone's cup of tea. As much as he had some other weird outliers, Family Plot is the weirdest outlier of them all. It's a movie that you have to love Hitchcock to appreciate, and even then, it will aggressively work against everything you know about the man, his movies, and your love of them. It's a man looking back on his life, and instead of reckoning with it, having some fun with it. It might be a little too fine-tuned and a little too irreverent in parts, but I think it's clear Hitch wanted to go out doing the one thing he had never really done before with a movie: chilling out and having some fun, even, maybe especially, at his own expense. It's hard to find fault with a man who wants to write such a final creative chapter. I'm glad I saved it for last. Given his droll sense of humor, it feels appropriate that the last victim of it should be himself.