Nat thought – it’s light, it’s fluffy, it’s sweet; it’s a cupcake.
Before Hitchcock, I’d never seen a Hitchcock. Scandalous, I know. And although watching a movie about the man is not the same thing as watching one of the man’s movies, I’m going to pretend it is.
I actually put off watching this for a couple of weeks, and in the end it was only because I thought – Hey it has Anthony Hopkins in it, how bad could it be? – that I even bothered. I love being wrong. I also love Ant (I’m going to call him this for the remainder of the review, even though I know he prefers Tony, because I’m lazy), or rather I love Hannibal Lecter, and let’s face it, almost every role Ant’s done after Silence of the Lambs has just been like watching Lecter again. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I wouldn’t mind if Ant did Hannibal in every role for the remains of his days (see what I did there?). Some people are still immensely watchable playing basically the same role over and over. But a few minutes into Hitchcock and I was surprised to see that Ant wasn’t doing Hannibal; he had prosthetics, a giant tummy, sounded like Michael Caine and kept pursing his lips after he spoke in a comical, Zoolander-blue-steel way. Not that there was anything wrong with that. It was just a surprise. Kind of like when I settled in to watch About Schmidt and suddenly realised Jack Nicholson wasn’t going to be doing Jack Nicholson. Of course, as I explained in my review of The Sessions, this is not always a bad thing.
Here he is as Hannibal. I mean as himself.