The Girl (2012)

This movie is in the vein of Mommie Dearest, but without the high camp hilarity and cat fights in the sunken lounge. The entire lumbering disaster should have been called The Fractured Fairy tales of T. Hedren, and it's clear from the start she is a victim. Tippi Hedren is a victim of her beauty, kindness, generosity of spirit and of course her sheer naïveté. Of course, it's nonsense...but not even unintentionally funny nonsense. It takes itself so seriously (like Hedren herself) although for what reason, I have no idea. Toby Jones and Imelda Staunton are good, but they are the only bright lights in a movie that is so underacted and underwhelming that it's painful to watch. Staunton is reduced to a mere cliché but works hard to give her character and the memory of Alma Hitchcock some gravitas.

Now to Sienna Miller, who has all the acting skills of lumber and runs the gamut of emotions from A to B. She is closest dramatically to Hedren herself who seems to blame Hitchcock for her premature career death. What is Miller's excuse for her inexorable and agonizing inability to act? She cannot blame Hitchcock...so I wonder who she does blame. Granted, she has a slim script and so many close ups of her face which is intended for her to emote. However her face is so botoxed, she has no emotion and instead just looks weepy and slack-jawed. It's funny really....Sienna Miller has virtually no acting skills but at least she could be relied on to use her face to give some meaning to her roles. Take that away...and she is a moving speaking coat hanger for replica fashions and an overworked wardrobe department.

The script is clunky, slow and overwrought. The scenes of bad acting are strung together with no apparent connection or rationale and the long lingering camera shots of Sienna with her blank face and shabby accent make the film even less watchable. The final scene where Hitchcock asks Hedren to make herself "sexually available" to him is one of the most unintentionally crass and sloppy scenes in the film, and leads to the claim that Hedren has made repeatedly that it was Hitchcock who ruined her career.

After watching this clunker with Miller as Hedren, it's clear the reason Hedren failed was because she just couldn't act. There is a line, where according to Hedren, Hitch took a "..living breathing woman and turned her into a statue." Perhaps this is the most honest line in the entire film. Both Hedren and Miller have all the acting skills of a statue without the benefits of a statue's silence.