The Girl

HBO's The Girl was one of two 2012 movies (the other being Hitchcock, starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren) suggesting that filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was sexually obsessed with the blonde leading ladies of his films—especially Tippi Hedren, star of The Birds and Marnie. The Girl boasts two interesting lead performances by Sienna Miller as model-turned-actress Hedren and Toby Jones as Hitchcock in his early 60s. After enjoying enormous success with hit movies including North By Northwest and Psycho, Hitch turns his attention to adapting Daphne Du Maurier's short story “The Birds” into a horror film. The plot here is built around Hedren's real-life assertions that the director—who discovered her and signed her to an exclusive contract—tried to coerce her into a sexual relationship and then killed her nascent career when she wouldn't cooperate, as detailed in Donald Spoto's 2009 book Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies. Directed by Julian Jarrold, the film does sport stylistic snap, along with sharp supporting performances from Imelda Staunton (as Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville) and Penelope Wilton as Hitchcock's secretary. But the turgid, one-dimensional screenplay by Gwyneth Hughes gets off on the wrong foot by distorting a number of basic facts, including what really happened during Hedren's Hitchcock-directed screen test, which is nothing like the exploitative version presented in The Girl—raising the question of why we should trust anything else in Jarrold's film (which Hedren herself has said lacks balance). But the larger problem here is the egregious conflation of Hitchcock's movies (victimization in The Birds and sexual anxiety in Marnie) with his mental health. Optional. (T. Keogh)