Not a masterpiece

Rating: 3/10 (18 June 2008)

Vertigo divides audiences more than any other Hitchcock film.
For one critic it is "one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us." A poll of 150 international critics has three times voted it the second greatest movie ever made (after Citizen Kane). However, many viewers find it a crashing bore.
I have sympathy for both camps.
Vertigo is the film in which Hitchcock comes closest to dealing directly with his own personal demons. The surface story makes no sense by itself and only works if you respond to the powerful undercurrents in its subtext. But Hitchcock still has to get the surface story right. It must fully embody the subtext and engage with its audience. For many people, it doesn't quite do either.
The prologue leaves Scottie hanging over an abyss. By not showing his rescue, Hitchcock effectively leaves him hanging there for the rest of the movie and his vertigo becomes a metaphor for his spiritual condition; he is poised between a longing for life and a longing for death. In rejecting the (real) life-affirming Midge and in his infatuation with the (illusory) death-obsessed Madeleine, he makes his fateful choice.
However, the prologue also supports a literal interpretation of his vertigo and the next scene doesn't really establish that Scottie's problems go deeper than his understandable fear of heights. We learn that he and Midge were once lovers but there is no follow through that explains why he broke off the relationship or why he becomes besotted with what we later learn is just a fantasy women.
The next scene, with Elster, is even more unfortunate and its defects reverberate throughout the movie. Elster could have been depicted as a sort of Mephistopheles, who sees Scottie's weakness and tempts him to his doom. In fact, he is thinly-sketched and is just a device for kicking off the story.
More crucially, he tells Scottie too much about Madeleine's obsession with Carlotta. This virtually forces Scottie into being the level-headed sceptic and makes his subsequent neurotic behaviour even more arbitrary and difficult to believe. It also undermines the ten-minute wordless sequence of Scottie trailing Madeleine around San Francisco.
If Elster has simply asked Scottie to investigate his wife's aimless wandering, we would have started out expecting something mundane (like an affair) only to be drawn into the much more intriguing mystery of her identification with Carlotta and her apparent sleepwalk towards suicide. As it is, the sequence merely confirms what Elster has already told us and often tries the patience of the audience. For many, the picture never recovers.
Moreover, because Scottie's character is under-developed (and Stewart's performance is unable to realise what the story implies) the rest of the movie can be viewed as the tale of an ordinary man who becomes infatuated with an attractive, troubled, woman whose life he has saved. The shadow of Carlotta then becomes an incidental detail and we get only a weak sense that Scottie's love is an unhealthy obsession. His eventual break-down is then under-motivated and seems imposed on the picture rather than being integral to its structure (a feeling reinforced by Hitchcock's decision to present it in an abstract, symbolic way).
I don't view Vertigo in this way, but I can sympathise with those that do.
With Scottie's breakdown, the picture reaches a second turning point. When Midge walks down the hospital corridor and the screen fades to black, it feels as if the movie is over. Of course it isn't and what happens next is crucial. Nothing up to that point makes any sense without it. But a second structural flaw immediately emerges. We are three-quarters of the way through the movie but only half-way through the story. Just when Vertigo needs time to re-engage our interest after the false ending it suddenly accelerates.
We get a montage that establishes Scottie's continuing obsession with Madeleine, then he spots Judy, follows her home and we are immediately plunged into a flashback that 'explains' the plot. This meeting needed much better preparation and the subsequent relationship needed more time to develop.
By revealing the plot twist so early, Hitchcock is inviting us to see how self-defeating Scottie's neurotic behaviour really is: in recreating Madeleine he is inevitably destroying his own illusions. But he rushes through this process. We have no time to get to know the real Judy before we are confronted with Scottie's bizarre plan to transform her. Then, at the very moment the transformation is complete, Scottie immediately spots the deception so the picture gallops to its climax and then slams to a halt.
As a good professional, Hitchcock was wary about letting any of his pictures run over two hours, but if he wanted to impose this discipline on himself, then he should have been more ruthless in pruning the first half of the story. In fact, he should have just accepted that this story couldn't be told effectively in two hours and have let it run on longer.
We rightly admire Hitchcock's movies for their great set pieces, but tend to overlook their fragile story sense and relatively weak dramatic structure. Mostly, that didn't matter, but in an ambitious picture like Vertigo it is a fatal flaw.
There is much more to Vertigo than its detractors acknowledge, but it is far from being the near-perfect masterpiece that its most fervent admirers would have us believe.