Review of Marnie (1964) by Drew S — 29 May 2010

Alfred Hitchcock did some great character work in his time, but his employment of psychology has always been unsubtle at best. The most obvious example of this is the long-winded, useless dissection of Norman Bates's criminal transvestism in Psycho, but it's even more blatant and pervasive in Marnie. We're made to understand very early in the film that Marnie has an unexplained fear of the color red; she sees a vase of flowers in her mother's house and tweaks out, and the screen floods with bright red light. Effective, if not a little over-the-top. What really pushes this device into hokey territory are its ten other occurrences throughout the course of the film. YES WE GET IT! BITCH IS AFRAID OF RED! For all the supposed stupidity running rampant in the films of today, the classics of fifty years ago sure weren't hurting for it either. Though it deserves credit for trying to get into its heroine's head, Marnie is scarcely more poignant or observant than any of today's half-assed psychological thrillers. To its credit, there are a few really interesting sections where answers and character traits are not force fed to us. One such scene occurs toward the beginning of the film, when Marnie is having a conversation with her mother, who is suspicious of all the money her daughter's spending. Marnie coyly informs her that the Bible says "money answereth all things," which deeply irritates her mother. Perhaps Marnie doesn't put much faith in religion, or perhaps she does, or perhaps she's just being a contrarian to get at her mother. Tippi Hedren is inconsistent and sort of hysterical through most of the movie, not quite the frigid resourceful thief we expect her to be, but her intelligent handling of this throwaway line tells us fifty times more about Marnie than Hitchcock's Freudian string pulling.

What I found most interesting about Marnie is the constant moral gray area it maneuvers through. Really, none of these people are decent, but there's a sick sort of interest in trying to figure out whether the movie is telling you that Sean Connery is. And believe me, he's not. Is the movie really trying to pass this manipulative pseudo-rapist off as a hero? The ending positions him as both Marnie's savior and her superior, which to me points at "yes." But then it's sympathetic toward Marnie too...is the movie complex, or just confused? I'm thinking a little of both. Hitchcock's women have never been extremely strong, and are generally more reactive than proactive. Here Marnie often gets to push the action, but it's Mark who drives the story to its ultimate goal, which leaves us feeling a little cheated of a protagonist who works through her own problems. She's the more interesting character; she's the one we want to see taking the reins in the climax. Instead, we just get some horribly aged, cheesily filmed psychotic break.

This is generally accepted as one of Hitchcock's missteps, and though its stature as a female-centric melodramatic thriller is unique among his oeuvre, it's easy to understand its failures. I left the movie feeling that it occupied my time well, and I had been exposed to a captivating portrait of an unusual woman, but at the same time I though it sort of humiliated her and gave way too much credit to Mark. I guess you could say that my personal dissatisfaction with it was no fault of the movie's, but my own; the ideology at its core seems rocky to me, however, and I can't help but feel that the movie's portrayal of Marnie cold have been a little more even.