The Girl

The Girl is an odd bird of a movie (no pun intended). Hitchcock’s movies were always built on a slow, simmering pace. So weird, then, that The Girl — a movie about Hitchcock and the difficult relationship he had with his final Hitchcock Blonde. Tippi Hedren, — moves at a breakneck pace, jumping from one scene to another, giving no room for scenes to breathe or land, giving you no sense of the passage of time. Perhaps that’s fitting of Hitchcock, then, in a weird way. A man so complex, so bizarre, so seemingly contradictory in his very nature, should have a movie about him in his final peak years feel so at odds with how he made films. There’s poetry in that. A lot of criticism is levied at this movie for potential historical inaccuracies, as few if any people have come forward to corroborate Tippi’s tale of their relationship (Tippi herself has contradicted herself on occasion). It’s not my place to judge to accuracies of Tippi’s story. This movie exists to document them, and in that, I think it does so well. Hitchcock is at times warm and doting, and other times cold and possessive, and other times still perverse and twisted. The filming of the attic scene in The Birds, for instance, in which he lies to Tippi and surprises her on the day of the shoot with real birds, and does dozens of takes over five days, giving her PTSD and physical wounds all over her body, is a fantastic example of his merciless, mercurial nature; when he can’t have what he wants, he is vengeful, a toddler stamping his feet and crying in the toy aisle. When he insists that her character be stripped nude in Marnie and raped by her husband, he watches with prurient focus, while she shuts down entirely, her eyes dead as marble. If he can’t have Tippi, he’ll enjoy her from afar while making her regret her decision. Tippi, though, is no shrinking violet, standing up for herself on more than one occasion, including a powerful scene where she returns to film The Birds with such a flourish, she says without saying it “was that your best shot, fat boy?”. Hats off to Toby Jones and Sienna Miller for playing their roles well. Jones does a fantastic job with the broad spectrum of facets to Hitchcock’s personality, and Miller projects both a warmth, a strength, and transforms from a starry-eyed naive hopefully to a resilient, self-actualized woman. It’s too bad then that it moves so fast. At an hour and a half, it breezes through several years of their lives, giving no time for much of anything to land. The only people we see this tempestuous relationship effect is another crew member, who is positioned as a love interest but is married, and Hitchcock’s wife, who mainly just suffers in quiet desperation. We don’t see a larger impact, which makes the movie feel oddly claustrophobic and only colored in the center. And while Miller’s acting is great, and she looks like a Hitchcock Blonde (if anything, she often bears more of a resemblance to Grace Kelly), the one thing she lacks is the icy aloofness HB’s often exuded in the movies. She’s TOO warm, if that makes sense. I know, we’re not watching the movies Tippi Hedren starred in, but you never get a sense of why Hitchcock saw in this untrained model what he saw in Kim Novak or Grace Kelly or Janet Leigh. It’s still an interesting film, though. The cinematography would’ve made Hitchcock happy, with lots of weird tracking shots and and shots from unusual angles. It’s enjoyable enough, not a date night movie by any means, but certainly worth a go. And at 90 minutes, while a bit too breezy in its editing, it doesn’t drag out the topic either. It gets in, does it’s job, and gets out. I’m okay with that.