Marnieby Anonymous
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September 09, 2005:
It would be a slight understatement to say that Alfred Hitchcock's "Marnie" is an unusual psychological thriller. Beneath the beautiful and poised persona she presents to the world, Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren in a superb performance) is a compulsive thief and sexually frigid, with a mysterious terror of thunderstorms and the color red. Like the other heroines in Hitchcock's previous films ("Psycho" and "The Birds"), she is also a liar who is made to suffer disproportionately the consequences of her lying. Her punishment is Mark Rutland (Sean Connery who is also splendid), an ex-zoologist and sexual blackmailer who threatens to turn Marnie over to the police if she does not agree to marry him. He exudes a cruel, wary fascination for the heroine that steadily builds into one of the most disturbing portraits of courtship and desire in Hitchcock's entire output. His liberation of Marnie from her mental trauma is the substance of the drama but one cannot help feeling that, with Mark as her predatory mate, Marnie's problems might conceivably be just beginning. Alfred Hitchcock considered "Marnie" an unusual mystery because the search is not for a criminal but for the criminal's motivations. It's possible that even he didn't realize that this "search for motivation" is NOT the key to the film, and those viewers led to believe it is will find the final scene infuriating. First and foremost, "Marnie" is about a woman with many aliases, who is involved in a desperate "search for identity," who can only stop living a life of lies if she learns the truth about her past. Finding out exactly what happened on that fateful, fatal night in Marnie's childhood is not necessary. What matters is that Marnie learns of an event, any event, that happened in her life just before she moved permanently into a world of make believe. This bit of history is the shaky foundation in which she can build a real life. Actually, the particular events that transpired on that horrible night only explain the content of Marnie's nightmares and the reason she reacts hysterically to thunderstorms and the color red and her mother's motivations for denying Marnie motherly love and indoctrinating her to detest all men (thereby ruining her child's life). The revelations also serve to let viewers draw parallels between Marnie and her mother. The revelations in the film don't sufficiently explain why Marnie is a thief and is frigid, but that's fine because we can deduce the reasons early in the film. "Marnie" is one of the strangest and most haunting of Hitchcock's films. It is finely acted by the entire cast. Diane Baker as Mark's jealous sister-in-law, Lil, Louise Latham as Marnie's mother, and Martin Gabel as Strutt are as impressive as the principals. Bernard Herrmann's surging score is richly romantic. It may not be the finest of his stunning quintet of films beginning with "Vertigo", but it serves as a summation of his films at this time: the bold and unusual technique, the increasingly complex probings into areas of human sexuality and individual identity, not to mention subsidiary themes to do with female criminality, male criminality, and maternal possessiveness. [filmfactsman]
This review was written about the DVD Wide Screen / Mono edition.
Marnieby Anonymous
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January 18, 2004:
My wife and I agree that this is the worst movie that either of us has either seen--EVER. The plot seems to have come from one of those sobby books for half-bright and troubled pre-teens in sixth grade. Worse yet, it's more boring than watching paint dry. This is basically Oprah writ large, an endless whinefest about the nobility of irresponsibility and dysfunctional self-absorbtion. Bottom line: If you like Dr. Laura and her sob sister genre and need prozac for breakfast, you might like this movie. Otherwise, the mere time it takes to slog through it isn't worth it.
This review was written about the DVD Wide Screen / Mono edition.
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