Ken Tucker Praises Vera Farmiga's Knife-Sharp Performance

"You scare me; I think you might need help," said Norman Bates to his mother, Norma, on a recent episode of A&E's shrewdly insinuating Bates Motel.Given that we know Norman is eventually going to start dressing up like said mother and commence to knifin' folks once he goes Psycho, this bit of Norman insight into the Norma psyche is both significant and indicative of what could have, should have, gone wrong with a TV quasi-prequel to Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 thriller. Bates Motel, as co-created by producers including Lost man Carlton Cuse, did a fine job of casting Freddie Highmore as its adolescent Tony Perkins—he's got Perkins' wide-eyed, gulping demeanor down (very) cold—but the character of Norma had to be built from the ground up as the element that grounds the series.
Which is where the performance of Vera Farmiga comes in, with its impressively sly approximation of neurotic spontaneity.
It's a considerable achievement to make it look easy to blow off George Clooney's charms, as Vera Farmiga did in her movie breakthrough Up in the Air; it's another to make it look easy to blow up a movie touchstone like Psycho and not come across as either an interloper or a loon. In a role that requires its actress to smother her son's sanity and libido with mother love and still seem non-icky enough to both run a motel and remain a sympathetic protagonist in a weekly series, Farmiga has probably had weeks where she wishes she'd done something easier, like freeze in Croatia while learning to speak George R.R. Martin in Game of Thrones.Instead, she's steadily perfected a new kind of TV protagonist: the sensual hysteric, the volatile reassurer.As a chunk of plotted drama, Bates Motel is highly uneven and still trying to find the right balance between murderous melodrama and domestic family saga gone screwy. But right from the start, Farmiga has been giving a fully thought-through, utterly distinctive performance.