[Film Review] To Die For (1995) and Psycho (1998)

Two Gus Van Sant’s 1990s pictures about psychopaths, between which is sandwiched his mainstream breakthrough and awards magnet GOOD WILL HUNTING (1997). TO DIE FOR is about a career-driven, small-town reporter’s delusional, murderous ploy to get rid of her hubby, who tries to bog her down with child-bearing, it is a soap opera starring a scrumptious Nicole Kidman in her first “major” role that proves she is not just a pretty face and a gorgeous fashion plate.

Suzanne Stone (Kidman) is a pluperfect specimen of lusciousness and blond ambition, it is easy to see why Larry Maretto (a blandly benevolent Dillon), an Italian-American restauranteur, is swept off his feet by her. However, the film doesn’t elaborate on why Suzanne decides to get hitched. Because Larry is so irresistibly good-looking or she simply marries for financial stability? Neither can convince audience such is the case. It soon becomes clear that it is a wrong move on her part, which speaks volume of her naivety and conformity to the societal dictates at large. In hindsight, the best advice the film can confer to a careen woman is that never walk down the aisle hastily.

Suzanne’s spotlight-craving impulse bares its teeth right away in the onset of their ill-fated marriage, during the honeymoon, the film suggests that there is no moral boundary in her pursuit of ascendancy (George Segal is spot on in a lascivious cameo), which guarantees that this glamour puss is totally unfit for the role of a traditional wife. Soon by hexing and manipulating three impressionable high schoolers, including putting out with Jimmy (Phoenix, still possessing a sharp jawline in his bizarre adolescent phase peppered by ennui and hormones, makes for a commensurable foil in the folie à deux), Suzanne hatches a rather facile plan to getting Larry out of her way and not for one second, dreads its grave consequences. Basking in the media circus in the wake of Larry’s death, Suzanne finally becomes the cynosure she craves and she enjoys every minute of it, but the world is far much sinister than she thinks, a tit for tat awaits her just when she believes she can get away with murder by selling Jimmy down the river, a surprising cameo from Cronenberg is the icing on the cake.

TO DIE FOR is a pitch-black comedy, and its soapy elements are vivaciously elevated by Kidman’s high-wire acting and needle-point nicety. Suzanne is a one-track-minded blondie planning her amoral affairs through a pair of rose-colored glasses, oblivious of any complications. On paper, the character sounds fictitious and shallow, but Kidman resists from cheapening or mocking Suzanne’s devotion that someday her ship will come in, and her deliriously watchable performance is preciously devoid of histrionics, it is another classic case of the so-called American dream going down the toilet.

The psychopath in PSYCHO, a nearly shot-for-shot, full color remake of Hitchcock’s deathless PSYCHO (1960), is the mommy’s boy Norman Bates, embodied by Vince Vaughn before his towering physique balloons, with enough mugging, emoting and loping, but cannot hold a candle to Anthony Perkins’s tic-twinged perversion and twisted vulnerability. The awful truth is, nothing in this remake can outsmart its sacrosanct predecessor (although one could argue that Julianne Moore exerts herself with more resolution in Lila Crane than Vera Miles in Hitch’s picture). So the best way to watch Van Sant’s film is to remember the proverbial saying “imitation is the sincere form of flattery”, it is a one-off, and quite costly experiment from Hollywood’s everlasting refashioning factory, a redux ritualistically slavish to the original, more invested in calibrating Hitchcock’s superb techniques (that twirling shot originated from a vertical close-up of a lifeless Marion’s eyeball is a master stroke of camera choreography and movement) than putting a new spin on the sensational material.

Opening with a complete traveling shot panning and zooming over the city of Phoenix into Marion Crane’s hotel room, the remake presents Van Sant’s upmost veneration to Hitchcock, a feat the latter couldn’t accomplish at his time, smack dab in the beginning. Anne Heche’s pixie-cut Marion Crane is unfairly bad-mouthed for retreading the path of an already iconic role from Janet Leigh. Examined or ogled by the omnipresent, belittling, lecherous male gaze, her Marion shows enough guarded resilience to solider on, her initial sympathy towards a faux-innocent Norman is also marked by little yellow flags. Such assignment is always a mug’s game but Heche shouldn’t be singled out for the film’s own intrinsic defect, it only betrays the society’s unrelieved sexism because the weakest link is Vaugh, who ought to be under the flaks for his less than satisfactory mimicry and grandstanding.

Elsewhere, Van Sant’s PSYCHO rehashes Bernard Herrmann’s lush, suspenseful original score boldly if occasionally stridently, and Saul Bass’s geometrically innovative title sequences is always a treat for sore eyes. Also, Van Sant secretively interleaves several surreal snapshots into the two famous murder scenes, what does one see right before their life is unexpectedly snuffed out? Van Sant reveals his answers in blink-and-you-miss-it flourishes.

Although both pictures stand relatively low on the rung among Van Sant’s oeuvre - TO DIE FOR is regarded chiefly as a Kidman vehicle of transmogrification while PSYCHO denotes the nadir of his career (let not forget THE SEA OF TREES, 2015 though) - they are scintillating character studies of aberrant, certifiable souls, never too dull even for a finicky viewer.

referential entries: Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960, 9.2/10); Gus Van Sant’s GOOD WILL HUNTING (1997, 8.1/10), RESTLESS (2011, 6.8/10).