Toby Or Not Toby

I just watched The Girl, the HBO movie about the relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren.  They made two films together, The Birds and Marnie, while Hitch made advances behind the scenes that Tippi rebuffed.

The film isn't much, but I liked Toby Jones as Hitchcock.  I thought he had the voice and attitude down (as much as possible within the script).  With Sienna Miller, however, I never felt I was watching Tippi Hedren, just Sienna Miller.

I bring this up because Anthony Hopkins will soon be featured in the title role of a theatrical release called Hitchcock.  This film goes back one year and is about the filming of Psycho.  I don't think Hopkins has the voice.  In the trailer, I'm hearing Hopkins, not Hitchcock.  I realize he's an actor, not an impressionist, as anyone who's seen him play Nixon or Picasso know, but still, Hitchcock was such a distinctive public figure that it's distracting.  I'm guessing since Hopkins is a major actor and Toby Jones isn't, his movie will be getting all the attention.

This has happened before.  I wasn't especially impressed with Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role of Capote (though he's usually a fine actor), but he was so clearly "acting" that he won the Academy Award.  Meanwhile, Toby Jones was much more convincing as Truman Capote in Infamous, a film that covered the same ground, but no one paid any attention.