The Girl (2012)

Alfred Hitchcock was a rightly admired director and the master of suspense.His filmography also shows that he had several actors that regularly appeared in his movies such as Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, James Stewart etc.The Girl is a television movie that depicts a harrowing working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) and Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) while making the films The Bird and Marnie.The problem is what is presented as the truth is really a fictional account with the spin that Tippi Hedren is still alive to embellish actual events.Here we have Hitchcock falling for the nubile, young starlet and making her life hell on the film set especially after he feels rejected by her. Hedren later complained that Hitchcock ruined her promising film career.Toby Jones to me does not quiet cut it as Hitchcock in his look and voice. It is as interpretation he is giving and that is of a man who is obsessed, slightly perverted and deranged.I was more impressed by Sienna Miller as Hedren who plays the role as the classic blonde that Hitchcock liked to have in his films.The film leaves a sour taste behind with what is a character assassination of a respected but difficult director three decades after he died.

Directed by Julian Jarrold, "The Girl" documents the alleged sexual and psychological abuse of actress Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) at the hands of acclaimed film director Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones).Some have complained that "The Girl" engages in character assassination, and that it unfairly portrays Hitchcock as an abusive pervert. This is mostly irrelevant. Miller and Jones are unconvincing as Hedren and Hitchcock, their characters are superficially written and the film's central metaphor – that the productions of Hitchcock's "Marnie" and "The Birds" were deliberate attempts at indirect or symbolic rape – are silly. More importantly, the film's version of Hitchcock never convinces as either an obsessive control freak or sexually dysfunctional abuser; this is not how such personalities behave. "The Girl's" problem is not that it character assassinates Alfred Hitchcock, but that it trivialises and distorts what real psychological and sexual abuse looks like and how real victims and abusers look and behave when locked in such relationships.Ironically, Hitchcock's own films were superb at chronicling how women are abused and buffeted about by patriarchal forces. Hitchcock may have fetishized women, may have turned them into trinkets and ornaments, but his films were often explicitly about the problems of such psychic and literal violence. "The Girl", in contrast, is just bad art.5/10 - Worth one viewing.

Well-enough produced cable-film, adapted from Donald Spoto's book "Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and his Leading Ladies", seems to have been made simply to show off the sadistic antics of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, something most film-buffs are already aware of from books--better ones than Spoto's--and from Hollywood folklore. Hitchcock's wife and confidant, Alma (Imelda Staunton) is the first to spot model Tippi Hedren on television and recommends her to Hitch for the lead in his next thriller, "The Birds"; smitten with the Swedish blonde, he grooms her, trains her, seduces her (clumsily, it appears) and amuses himself by shocking her. Just because Sienna Miller has been given the correct shade of blonde hair to play Hedren does not mean she is well-cast; sparkling, girlishly innocuous and effusive, Sienna's Tippi begins the film-within-the-film as an eager newcomer ("I'm putty in your hands!" she flirtatiously tells Hitchcock) but is soon staring numbly out car windows or complaining about her working hours...and it doesn't wash. So much care has been given to the production design that apparently no one thought to craft a convincing character here--or to cast an ideal actress in the role. The real Tippi Hedren was a mannered ice-queen who spoke with a haughty cadence; Miller sashays inside of strides, and smiles from ear to ear when paid a compliment. And if she's miscast, than Toby Jones is her unfortunate equal as Hitchcock. Jones looks like Hitch from the back, but his facial features are too small and he speaks far too rapidly. Much of the blame can be placed upon Julian Jarrold's uncommitted direction. Jarrold probably did his homework--and probably took delight in the performances his actors were giving--but he's all style. He knows the song by heart but he's sadly out of tune.

I knew I wanted to see The Girl as Alfred Hitchcock is my favourite director. It also had a very interesting subject that would have been even more so if done right. But when seeing it around Christmas, I found myself very disappointed overall, of all the programmes aired in the festive season The Girl gets my vote for being the biggest let down. It is not entirely bad though. The costumes and sets do look beautiful, the make up for Hitchcock is really outstanding and those birds are scary(sadly for them the scenes they featured in had no impact otherwise). But the best asset was easily Toby Jones' Hitchcock, an eerily brilliant performance- much much than a impersonation as I feared it would be- that gives an emotional complexity to a role that is written anything but here. Even the voice is spot on. In short, a very good example of a performance that was much better than the film(or TV film in The Girl's case) itself.Unfortunately for Jones, he is the only actor who is good. Imelda Staunton and Penelope Wilton do try hard but are criminally underused in very clichéd roles, while everybody else underacts embarrassingly. And I will say the same for Sienna Miller here too. She looks lovely but aside from that she only seems to be able to act terrified and act wooden. I know that Tippi Hedren is not considered among the best of actresses, I happen to think despite the lack of experience that she was better than given credit for, but Miller looks as though she was told to "look beautiful but don't try to act, other than in the scenes with the birds, as Hedren wasn't a good actress".The acting is not actually the worst thing about The Girl, the script and story were the main culprits. The script is a real clunker, often overwrought, very stilted and worst of all frustratingly one-sided. Here Hedren seems to be the victim sort of character, and throughout the only kind of sympathy shown for Hitchcock is that of self-pity, other than that he is little more than a lewd sadist. Okay I am not denying that Hedren was treated poorly by Hitchcock when filming The Birds, but Hitchcock's treatment of her in The Girl seems to be hysterically overboard here. You are wondering a lot how much truth is there here? The story feels very sluggishly paced, with the reenactment of the iconic telephone box scene tedious instead of frightening, despite the birds, the dream sequences are really hackneyed and the how Hedren was treated by Hitchcock is dealt with in The Girl in a repetitive and very episodic fashion.Julian Jarrold's direction is routine and does nothing to make the story or characters come to life. There is an over-reliance on close-ups, I don't mind close-ups as long as they are not used too much and are not overly-obvious, in both cases with The Girl they were overused and too obvious. We don't care for any of the characters, despite the actors. With Hedren and Hitchcock they are one-sided, that with how Hitchcock is written we cannot identify with him at all and Miller's performance is too bland to make Hedren's plight register with us. The rest of the characters are underwritten clichés, which is a big part of the underacting. I found little memorable about the music as well, only the use of Wagner's Tristan Und Isolde prelude stuck in my head and that's because it is one of my favourites and used quite nicely actually in the film.Overall though, considering the subject matter and the talent The Girl was a severe disappointment. 4/10 Bethany Cox