Gus Van Sant's remake (in color for a new generation unable to discern shapes and forms in black-and-white) scarcely merits discussion, but not because it desecrates the work of the Master. The 1960 original, already sullied by two sequels and a prequel, was below-average Hitchcock; and several better films of his had been remade before this, without undermining or overshadowing the originals. (Hitchcock himself remade his The Man Who Knew Too Much, and he alone showed improvement.) Van Sant, however, raised some eyebrows when he sent up a publicity balloon with the information — or misinformation, as it would turn out that the new Psycho was to be a shot-for-shot replication of the old. That hot-air bag is squashed beneath the buttocks of Viggo Mortensen and Anne Heche, slashed by the death's-door visions of William H. Macy. Other minor modernizations — Vince Vaughn's unmistakable masturbation at the peephole into the motel bathroom, Julianne Moore's ever-present Walkman — are no more worth mentioning than they were worth doing. Despite these little detours on the tracing paper, Van Sant overall adheres close enough to Hitchcock to hamstring the normally free-wheeling Hong Kong cinematographer, Chris Doyle, who may well wonder why he was summoned. Even the color, with nothing on which to model itself, is pallid and dull. Pointlessness, pointlessness, everywhere you look. And when you know what's coming, the old Bernard Herrmann musical score (adapted by Danny Elfman) sounds more overwrought than ever. Still, the movie in its slavishness can hardly help but be better constructed and paced than latter-day slasher stuff, as well as better judged in its dishing-out of gore. Mortensen, Moore, and Macy all bring individuality to their parts, and the performance of a thickened and coarsened Chad Everett as a hail-fellow Mr. Moneybags is the nearest thing to a shock that the movie can deliver. But "interpretation," to put a nice face on it, is on a short leash here. To liken the undertaking, as the filmmakers might wish, to a new production of Hamlet, or some such repertory staple, would be a bit off the mark. A new production of The Demon Barber of Fleet Street would be closer. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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