Hit Man (2023)
June 7, 2024 9:53 AM - Subscribe
A professor moonlighting as a hit man of sorts for his city police department, descends into dangerous, dubious territory when he finds himself attracted to a woman who enlists his services.
Oscar-nominated director Richard Linklater's sunlit neo-noir stars Glen Powell as strait-laced professor Gary Johnson, who moonlights as a fake hit man for the New Orleans Police Department. Preternaturally gifted at inhabiting different guises and personalities to catch hapless people hoping to bump off their enemies, Gary descends into morally dubious territory when he finds himself attracted to one of those potential criminals, a beautiful young woman named Madison (Adria Arjona). As Madison falls for one of Gary's hit man personas -- the mysteriously sexy Ron -- their steamy affair sets off a chain reaction of play acting, deception, and escalating stakes.
Natalia Keogan: After several weeks, Madison and “Ron” meet again; she declares that she’s newly divorced, owing her freedom to his candid advice. Sparks continue to fly between the two, partly because of Madison’s fascination with “Ron’s” illicit occupation, and they begin a sexual relationship. While Gary might be lying to Madison about his milquetoast true identity, his lover might not be telling the whole truth herself.
Much of the hype for Hit Man stems from Powell and Arjona’s crackling chemistry, so integral to the plot that their character development largely unfolds during sex scenes (leaving little room for discourse about whether these encounters are “gratuitous”). While the notion that Hit Man contains the “first sex scene” in a Linklater film isn’t necessarily true (and has been denied by the director), viewers aren’t totally wrong to note that it approaches sex differently than his other works: Dazed and Confused dabbles in the navigation of budding libidos; Everybody Wants Some!! revolves around horny college freshmen trying to get laid, but it’s hardly about experiencing genuine connection; the Before trilogy, conversely, finds its innate sexiness from anticipatory arousal.
Moira Macdonald: Billed at its opening as “a somewhat true story” (Linklater and co-screenwriter Powell take some liberties with the facts of Johnson’s life), “Hit Man” is an unlikely love story on two levels. It’s simultaneously a steamy romance between Gary and Madison (Adria Arjona), a sultry femme fatale who approaches Gary desperately hoping he can bump off her husband, and an intellectual love affair between Gary and the idea of changing yourself, of how performing as a person of passion and recklessness and danger might lead you to examine who you are. What’s especially charming about the latter is that Gary, a nerdy sweetheart who lives alone with his two cats and is an avid bird-watcher, is clearly the opposite of danger. Powell’s delightful performance, as both Gary and “Ron” (Madison’s hit man), lets us see the pleasure Gary finds in disappearing into another person, yet still remaining true to himself. He does a perfect wink near the end, during an equally perfect scene that I won’t spoil, that had me practically shrieking for joy.
Clarisse Loughrey: As Gary’s narration points out, the idea of a readily attainable rent-a-killer is pure Hollywood bull, a naive fantasy of a quick (if ethically troublesome) fix to life’s most stubborn problems. But, clearly, it’s a tempting prospect to some, and when Gary is suddenly asked to step into Jasper’s role, he becomes fully invested in transforming himself into other people’s ideal saviours. At one point, it’s a full-blown impression of Christian Bale in American Psycho, glossy skin and all. At another, it’s a refined British flavour of sociopathy that’s shades of Tilda Swinton.
Powell’s transition between identities plays like a magic trick, with Gary as the genuine Clark Kent ruse, his square-jawed handsomeness hidden behind a slicked-down side part, wireframe glasses, and terrible posture. Hit Man also works as proof of Powell’s versatility: he’s goofy and sweet one minute, tough the next. And, when Gary finds himself falling head over heels in love with one of his targets, Adria Arjona’s Maddy, Powell turns on the charm like a blowtorch, in a way that proves that all the buzz around his chemistry with his Anyone But You romcom co-star Sydney Sweeney wasn’t empty social media talk.
Maddy hires Gary’s hitman, now a leather-jacketed, GQ cover star-type called Ron, to take out her abusive husband. But the sincerity of her plight leads Gary to warn her off a potential life behind bars and instead strike out on her own. Soon enough, they’re embroiled in a highly charged affair that’s all the more sexy for the many lies upon which it’s built.
Arjona matches Powell’s passions, while Linklater, with a touch of his signature nonchalance, sprinkles in a few of Gary’s classroom musings on whether people can truly change. The director’s films, from Dazed and Confused to the Before trilogy, have always been concerned with how we can find our place in this world. In Hit Man, Powell can transform so readily, that answer seems to be wherever we like.
Trailer
Oscar-nominated director Richard Linklater's sunlit neo-noir stars Glen Powell as strait-laced professor Gary Johnson, who moonlights as a fake hit man for the New Orleans Police Department. Preternaturally gifted at inhabiting different guises and personalities to catch hapless people hoping to bump off their enemies, Gary descends into morally dubious territory when he finds himself attracted to one of those potential criminals, a beautiful young woman named Madison (Adria Arjona). As Madison falls for one of Gary's hit man personas -- the mysteriously sexy Ron -- their steamy affair sets off a chain reaction of play acting, deception, and escalating stakes.
Natalia Keogan: After several weeks, Madison and “Ron” meet again; she declares that she’s newly divorced, owing her freedom to his candid advice. Sparks continue to fly between the two, partly because of Madison’s fascination with “Ron’s” illicit occupation, and they begin a sexual relationship. While Gary might be lying to Madison about his milquetoast true identity, his lover might not be telling the whole truth herself.
Much of the hype for Hit Man stems from Powell and Arjona’s crackling chemistry, so integral to the plot that their character development largely unfolds during sex scenes (leaving little room for discourse about whether these encounters are “gratuitous”). While the notion that Hit Man contains the “first sex scene” in a Linklater film isn’t necessarily true (and has been denied by the director), viewers aren’t totally wrong to note that it approaches sex differently than his other works: Dazed and Confused dabbles in the navigation of budding libidos; Everybody Wants Some!! revolves around horny college freshmen trying to get laid, but it’s hardly about experiencing genuine connection; the Before trilogy, conversely, finds its innate sexiness from anticipatory arousal.
Moira Macdonald: Billed at its opening as “a somewhat true story” (Linklater and co-screenwriter Powell take some liberties with the facts of Johnson’s life), “Hit Man” is an unlikely love story on two levels. It’s simultaneously a steamy romance between Gary and Madison (Adria Arjona), a sultry femme fatale who approaches Gary desperately hoping he can bump off her husband, and an intellectual love affair between Gary and the idea of changing yourself, of how performing as a person of passion and recklessness and danger might lead you to examine who you are. What’s especially charming about the latter is that Gary, a nerdy sweetheart who lives alone with his two cats and is an avid bird-watcher, is clearly the opposite of danger. Powell’s delightful performance, as both Gary and “Ron” (Madison’s hit man), lets us see the pleasure Gary finds in disappearing into another person, yet still remaining true to himself. He does a perfect wink near the end, during an equally perfect scene that I won’t spoil, that had me practically shrieking for joy.
Clarisse Loughrey: As Gary’s narration points out, the idea of a readily attainable rent-a-killer is pure Hollywood bull, a naive fantasy of a quick (if ethically troublesome) fix to life’s most stubborn problems. But, clearly, it’s a tempting prospect to some, and when Gary is suddenly asked to step into Jasper’s role, he becomes fully invested in transforming himself into other people’s ideal saviours. At one point, it’s a full-blown impression of Christian Bale in American Psycho, glossy skin and all. At another, it’s a refined British flavour of sociopathy that’s shades of Tilda Swinton.
Powell’s transition between identities plays like a magic trick, with Gary as the genuine Clark Kent ruse, his square-jawed handsomeness hidden behind a slicked-down side part, wireframe glasses, and terrible posture. Hit Man also works as proof of Powell’s versatility: he’s goofy and sweet one minute, tough the next. And, when Gary finds himself falling head over heels in love with one of his targets, Adria Arjona’s Maddy, Powell turns on the charm like a blowtorch, in a way that proves that all the buzz around his chemistry with his Anyone But You romcom co-star Sydney Sweeney wasn’t empty social media talk.
Maddy hires Gary’s hitman, now a leather-jacketed, GQ cover star-type called Ron, to take out her abusive husband. But the sincerity of her plight leads Gary to warn her off a potential life behind bars and instead strike out on her own. Soon enough, they’re embroiled in a highly charged affair that’s all the more sexy for the many lies upon which it’s built.
Arjona matches Powell’s passions, while Linklater, with a touch of his signature nonchalance, sprinkles in a few of Gary’s classroom musings on whether people can truly change. The director’s films, from Dazed and Confused to the Before trilogy, have always been concerned with how we can find our place in this world. In Hit Man, Powell can transform so readily, that answer seems to be wherever we like.
Trailer
99% amazing. agree with all the above. there were some really neat callbacks to film noir both in soundtrack, cinematography, plot......the charisma, chemistry (&hotness!) of the leads was offscale.
but.....oh man, the last 1%? that ending 💩 . such a tonally jarring change, 5?7? years later, they look identical! motherhood & apple pie!!!?? talk about NOT sticking the landing.
I want the director's cut to end at the cop's body stopping breathing; maybe a monologue?
posted by lalochezia at 7:36 PM on June 8 [2 favorites]
but.....oh man, the last 1%? that ending 💩 . such a tonally jarring change, 5?7? years later, they look identical! motherhood & apple pie!!!?? talk about NOT sticking the landing.
I want the director's cut to end at the cop's body stopping breathing; maybe a monologue?
posted by lalochezia at 7:36 PM on June 8 [2 favorites]
I thought this was watchable but also forgettable. I really hate the trope of leading-man-as-sadsack until he takes off his glasses and fixes his hair; the main character didn't look or act believably at the outset, and the stakes of the story requires that we do buy in. The quick scenes of these crazy characters he'd play was entertaining (if silly) but it made me wonder why was he so unbelievable as Gary himself if he was so believable as these cartoonish hit men.
posted by stevil at 7:58 AM on June 9 [1 favorite]
posted by stevil at 7:58 AM on June 9 [1 favorite]
As a New Orleanian I appreciated the bounty of great locations. The club Virgil's isn't real but pretty much everywhere else was, I think. The Please-U is a greasy spoon Greek diner with a great gyro omelet and poker machines, nary a tourist to be seen like ever. Ted's Frostop is great old-school burgers, but they're never open past 5 so the nighttime setting isn't accurate. UNO's campus in the film is really UNO, the police station is really the old police station on Magazine and Napoleon. Pho Bang is really the Pho Bang in New Orleans East, interior too. Vaughn's! City Park! No cliched Bourbon Street bars, fake second lines, or terrible-looking gumbo! I did enjoy the actual film too, but two enthusiastic thumbs up for the location work.
posted by CheeseLouise at 9:26 AM on June 10 [7 favorites]
posted by CheeseLouise at 9:26 AM on June 10 [7 favorites]
I thought this was watchable but also forgettable. I really hate the trope of leading-man-as-sadsack until he takes off his glasses and fixes his hair;
This but I suppose, any person.
Though I agree with the review above that in this case I do think it's more emblematic of Clark Kent (Gary) vs Superman (Ron). More so, I wonder with Gary being a philosophy professor, there's almost a übermensch / Nietzsche aspect to Gary's transformation, by rejecting the mainstream morals to become this tough guy Ron, who has no qualms with killing. This kind of feels underlined in Gary's final class statement to the students about making themselves into something better (super?) and laying out a philosophical approach that there isn't a right or wrong so much as subjective interpretation.
This film was praised by a lot of people, but I agree that for the most part, it's ends up coming in just fine, but not great. I also agree with posters here, the ending was a bit of a failure. We're very much told that the people who died were bad people, a dirty, racist cop and an abusive controlling husband, ready to have his wife murdered for moving on, and I think that the story relies a little too much on this to absolve Gary and Madison at the end of the film. They're allowed to have their Norman Rockwell life, despite the sociopathic act of having sex while a human being, despicable as they may be, is quietly suffocating ten feet away. Gary's cool approach to placing the bag over Jaspar's head was pretty chilling. Based on Gary's closing statement to his class, there's almost a sense that the couple have moved forward into a realm where they feel comfortable deciding the relative value of life.
Perhaps the figurative bad taste comes from a societal expectation that someone who kills or clearly violates the law should pay some form of penalty for doing so. Gary was wrong to pursue his relationship with Madison, and it was that line of bad decision making which created a lot of the tension in the middle and final act. It lead to a tightening of the noose aspect as it seemed he was moments away from being caught by NOPD, or at minimum, fired, but then voila, Madison happens to have the right type of drugs to incapacitate Jaspar and and Gary has transitioned enough into his hit man persona to calmly kill the last remaining barrier to future marital bliss.
posted by Atreides at 7:12 AM on June 11 [2 favorites]
This but I suppose, any person.
Though I agree with the review above that in this case I do think it's more emblematic of Clark Kent (Gary) vs Superman (Ron). More so, I wonder with Gary being a philosophy professor, there's almost a übermensch / Nietzsche aspect to Gary's transformation, by rejecting the mainstream morals to become this tough guy Ron, who has no qualms with killing. This kind of feels underlined in Gary's final class statement to the students about making themselves into something better (super?) and laying out a philosophical approach that there isn't a right or wrong so much as subjective interpretation.
This film was praised by a lot of people, but I agree that for the most part, it's ends up coming in just fine, but not great. I also agree with posters here, the ending was a bit of a failure. We're very much told that the people who died were bad people, a dirty, racist cop and an abusive controlling husband, ready to have his wife murdered for moving on, and I think that the story relies a little too much on this to absolve Gary and Madison at the end of the film. They're allowed to have their Norman Rockwell life, despite the sociopathic act of having sex while a human being, despicable as they may be, is quietly suffocating ten feet away. Gary's cool approach to placing the bag over Jaspar's head was pretty chilling. Based on Gary's closing statement to his class, there's almost a sense that the couple have moved forward into a realm where they feel comfortable deciding the relative value of life.
Perhaps the figurative bad taste comes from a societal expectation that someone who kills or clearly violates the law should pay some form of penalty for doing so. Gary was wrong to pursue his relationship with Madison, and it was that line of bad decision making which created a lot of the tension in the middle and final act. It lead to a tightening of the noose aspect as it seemed he was moments away from being caught by NOPD, or at minimum, fired, but then voila, Madison happens to have the right type of drugs to incapacitate Jaspar and and Gary has transitioned enough into his hit man persona to calmly kill the last remaining barrier to future marital bliss.
posted by Atreides at 7:12 AM on June 11 [2 favorites]
tl;dr amoral immoral sociopaths are A-OK if they are sexy and do it with a nod and a wink and a good soundtrack
posted by lalochezia at 8:36 AM on June 11 [3 favorites]
posted by lalochezia at 8:36 AM on June 11 [3 favorites]
> I thought this was watchable but also forgettable. I really hate the trope of leading-man-as-sadsack until he takes off his glasses and fixes his hair;
Yeah it's always so hard to get past that. Like the students *just* noticed that their professor, movie star Glen Powell, hollywoods new romantic leading man, is hot, now that he, uhh, is dressing kind of douchy?
posted by dis_integration at 2:26 PM on June 11 [2 favorites]
Yeah it's always so hard to get past that. Like the students *just* noticed that their professor, movie star Glen Powell, hollywoods new romantic leading man, is hot, now that he, uhh, is dressing kind of douchy?
posted by dis_integration at 2:26 PM on June 11 [2 favorites]
Yeah on first watch at least this film gets a lot of free mileage just because it's not clear if or when it is ever going to go dark. There's a sense that surely it's going to do/be more than what it seems to be doing. It stays in bounds except for the dark joke at the end, which I think is ameliorated by
I can see why people mentioned Burn Notice in the same breath; not just the voiceovers, but the kind of cable TV low stakes and softness.
posted by fleacircus at 1:20 PM on June 14
I can see why people mentioned Burn Notice in the same breath; not just the voiceovers, but the kind of cable TV low stakes and softness.
posted by fleacircus at 1:20 PM on June 14
Kept trying to pin down what vibe I was getting from Glen Powell; settled on sort of a Jason Lee / Tom Cruise looks combo with a spritz of Clooney attitude.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 10:39 AM on June 24 [2 favorites]
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 10:39 AM on June 24 [2 favorites]
I just watched this and really enjoyed it.
W/r/t the Tom Cruise vibe, I think each of the characters Gary played might be based on other famous actors/villains/hitmen.
Trying to remember them all but the guy at the skeet range was Matthew McConaughy, the Guy in the suit in the hotel was a hilarious Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, and of course Ron is Cruise.
posted by OHenryPacey at 12:27 PM on June 24 [3 favorites]
W/r/t the Tom Cruise vibe, I think each of the characters Gary played might be based on other famous actors/villains/hitmen.
Trying to remember them all but the guy at the skeet range was Matthew McConaughy, the Guy in the suit in the hotel was a hilarious Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, and of course Ron is Cruise.
posted by OHenryPacey at 12:27 PM on June 24 [3 favorites]
I really enjoyed it, albeit the ending is ah...well, it's a bit surprising there. I'm surprised Gary was all in so fast once he found out his girlfriend IS an actual killer, after years of busting wannabe killers. No issues with that? No crisis of conscience? And the movie doesn't really even bother to investigate that too much. And after the phone/wire scene (well done, I admit) his cop pals are all "Welp, gee, sounds like she didn't do it, I guess we're just gonna let her go, shrug" was too easy. The white picket fence, two children ending surprised me right there. They make a good sexy couple, but I dunno, man. Also, how the hell are you going to maintain a public relationship with her now? I presume they moved?
Re: the drugs, presumably Madison might have drugged Ray and thus had enough sleepy drugs around (note she said she killed him while he wasn't conscious).
I really hate the trope of leading-man-as-sadsack until he takes off his glasses and fixes his hair;
Women have had that plotline for eons. I rather enjoyed that he didn't even get all that different in his looks, it was the personality that was selling him. He did make talking about space hot.
What this reminds me of is a conversation I had with a friend last night. I met her online in 2020 doing online theater. Circa 2020 she said she got a whole lot better parts online than she ever did in real life (I agreed). Now in 2024, she is CONSTANTLY in real life shows as big time leads, in addition to doing all the online theater too. I asked her how many shows she's doing a week and she said around five (okay, you can only rehearse one IRL usually). She said now she has the confidence going on and now gets better parts. (Really, I should learn from this.)
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:08 PM on July 1 [1 favorite]
Re: the drugs, presumably Madison might have drugged Ray and thus had enough sleepy drugs around (note she said she killed him while he wasn't conscious).
I really hate the trope of leading-man-as-sadsack until he takes off his glasses and fixes his hair;
Women have had that plotline for eons. I rather enjoyed that he didn't even get all that different in his looks, it was the personality that was selling him. He did make talking about space hot.
What this reminds me of is a conversation I had with a friend last night. I met her online in 2020 doing online theater. Circa 2020 she said she got a whole lot better parts online than she ever did in real life (I agreed). Now in 2024, she is CONSTANTLY in real life shows as big time leads, in addition to doing all the online theater too. I asked her how many shows she's doing a week and she said around five (okay, you can only rehearse one IRL usually). She said now she has the confidence going on and now gets better parts. (Really, I should learn from this.)
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:08 PM on July 1 [1 favorite]
The obvious criticism about this film is that it doesn't properly convey the moral weight of murder. The killers get away with it, and acting, script and direction seem to be doing some work to make us root for that outcome. Or maybe not, but generally you don't get the impression the film is terribly interested in its moral quandary.
Which is fine with me. Since I am, at the moment and hopefully for the forseeable future, thankfully leading the sort of the life, in which the question of killing seems blessedly abstract, my main interest lies somewhere else. This is, among other things, a movie about the power and joy of acting.
It somewhat supports one of my pet theories, namely that any actor sufficiently good at acting can seem, pretty much regardless of physical characteristics, exactly as sexy or not sexy as the role requires. (Sexy, not irresistible - there's a lot that goes into someone being open to your advances - no one could ever be sexy enough to win anyone over, but sexy enough that anyone would go, yeah, I kinda see it? I really think that! Not guaranteed to evoke specific desire, necessarily, but guaranteed to credibly convey potential desirabilty).
You might say I'm reaching, framing this particular film as evidence for that theory, because Glen Powell is after all, conventionally, cartoonishly handsome. Making him look a bit dweebish in slightly ill-fitting outfits in his initial college-professor era is the equivalent of putting glasses on Rachael Leigh Cook in She's All That, a typical Hollywood shorthand for an impending ugly-duckling transformation that has to rely on the audience's willing suspension of disbelief. But later, when Powell's character Gary adopts a wide range of additional personas for his fake Hit Man sting operations, it becomes readily apparent that he's quite capable of creating all manners of vibes so perfectly off-putting that they indeed manage to override his physical beauty.
Of course "being as unsexy as the role requires" regardless of physical characteristics is an easier feat than pulling it off in the other direction. But I've seen that too, more often in regional theatre, where actors are sometimes allowed to not be cartoonishly handsome to start with. (My favourite will always be a rather portly Ferdinand in a production of Schiller's Kabale und Liebe at the Schauspielhaus Graz during my college years, perfectly capturing the swooney, intoxciating, braincell-destroying swagger of the quintessential fuckboy).
Sadly, I think this really mostly works for actors, and only the better ones at that. Towards the end of the film, Powell's character delivers a final lecture to his students, selling the promise of radical at will transformation available to anyone. You can make yourself into whatever you want to be, as long as you do it with passion and conviction. The musical cues are rather rousing and the students seem appropriately uplifted. Are we supposed to be too?
The voice-over accompanying the final scenes of wedded bliss in the suburban pastoral tells us that our hero, having successfully incorporated his shadow, has finally found a balance of Gary, the dweeb, and Ron, the killer. He's got the middle class stability, the picture perfect family (beautiful wife, two kids), and the erotic frission fueled by shared secrets and shared transgression. He has swapped his cats for the dogs preferred by his wife. The kids ask how their parents met and she jokes about always suspecting a soft core behind the tough shell, when we know that actually, the tough shell was hiding a soft shell, was hiding a rather hard core.
Should we be sad about the cats?
Maybe it's all a performance anyway. Of course it's liberating to shed the parts that no longer suit us, to drop a role we were miscast in (maybe miscast ourselves in) from the start (even the best actors can be miscast), to finally start writing our own scripts.
I just keep thinking about a scene earlier in the film, when Gary meets up with his closest friend, his ex-wife. They speak very frankly about his various hang-ups and she encourages him to go find a therapist or a girlfriend, ideally both. It's the most naturalistic acting in the entire film, conveying a sort of weary familiarity, that sort of long-term, lived-in relationship where no one feels like pretending anymore.
Then the ex-wife completely disappears from the movie, and so does any gesture towards realism.
Of course the chemistry Gary has with Madison, his new love interest, the aspring femme fatale trying to solicit him for killing her husband, is intoxicating. There are lot of really effective, actually sexy sex scenes no one could possibly accuse of being superfluous, because they also contain most of the character and plot development. The banter is always on fire. From the moment they meet, they're acting a scene, both stepping out of their ordinary roles, entering completely unknown terrain and it's easy to see why roleplay is a kink for many people. It's also easy to see why actors often have affairs on set - closely working together can be a short-cut to intimacy, and there are not many jobs as conducive to intimacy as acting; to create the intended effect, you have to become attuned to each other, you have to pay minute attention, to catch your cues, to calibrate your response. The climax of the movie, the scene that really sells the romance, seals the bond, is not so much the murder these two commit together, but a scene that precedes it, when Gary, in his role as undercover police operative, arrives at Madison's house with a wire, fake-interrogating her, while actually feeding her cues on his smartphone to deceive his colleagues. To make it work, they have to completely submit to each other, each one picking up whatever they other puts down, accepting everything in the spirit of "Yes, and". It's the pure exhilaration of an impro-workshop, of those participants who feel they're pulling it off.
But they are never not acting a scene. It's impossible to imagine them having the sort of conversation Gary has with ex-wife.
posted by sohalt at 11:23 AM on July 26 [2 favorites]
Which is fine with me. Since I am, at the moment and hopefully for the forseeable future, thankfully leading the sort of the life, in which the question of killing seems blessedly abstract, my main interest lies somewhere else. This is, among other things, a movie about the power and joy of acting.
It somewhat supports one of my pet theories, namely that any actor sufficiently good at acting can seem, pretty much regardless of physical characteristics, exactly as sexy or not sexy as the role requires. (Sexy, not irresistible - there's a lot that goes into someone being open to your advances - no one could ever be sexy enough to win anyone over, but sexy enough that anyone would go, yeah, I kinda see it? I really think that! Not guaranteed to evoke specific desire, necessarily, but guaranteed to credibly convey potential desirabilty).
You might say I'm reaching, framing this particular film as evidence for that theory, because Glen Powell is after all, conventionally, cartoonishly handsome. Making him look a bit dweebish in slightly ill-fitting outfits in his initial college-professor era is the equivalent of putting glasses on Rachael Leigh Cook in She's All That, a typical Hollywood shorthand for an impending ugly-duckling transformation that has to rely on the audience's willing suspension of disbelief. But later, when Powell's character Gary adopts a wide range of additional personas for his fake Hit Man sting operations, it becomes readily apparent that he's quite capable of creating all manners of vibes so perfectly off-putting that they indeed manage to override his physical beauty.
Of course "being as unsexy as the role requires" regardless of physical characteristics is an easier feat than pulling it off in the other direction. But I've seen that too, more often in regional theatre, where actors are sometimes allowed to not be cartoonishly handsome to start with. (My favourite will always be a rather portly Ferdinand in a production of Schiller's Kabale und Liebe at the Schauspielhaus Graz during my college years, perfectly capturing the swooney, intoxciating, braincell-destroying swagger of the quintessential fuckboy).
Sadly, I think this really mostly works for actors, and only the better ones at that. Towards the end of the film, Powell's character delivers a final lecture to his students, selling the promise of radical at will transformation available to anyone. You can make yourself into whatever you want to be, as long as you do it with passion and conviction. The musical cues are rather rousing and the students seem appropriately uplifted. Are we supposed to be too?
The voice-over accompanying the final scenes of wedded bliss in the suburban pastoral tells us that our hero, having successfully incorporated his shadow, has finally found a balance of Gary, the dweeb, and Ron, the killer. He's got the middle class stability, the picture perfect family (beautiful wife, two kids), and the erotic frission fueled by shared secrets and shared transgression. He has swapped his cats for the dogs preferred by his wife. The kids ask how their parents met and she jokes about always suspecting a soft core behind the tough shell, when we know that actually, the tough shell was hiding a soft shell, was hiding a rather hard core.
Should we be sad about the cats?
Maybe it's all a performance anyway. Of course it's liberating to shed the parts that no longer suit us, to drop a role we were miscast in (maybe miscast ourselves in) from the start (even the best actors can be miscast), to finally start writing our own scripts.
I just keep thinking about a scene earlier in the film, when Gary meets up with his closest friend, his ex-wife. They speak very frankly about his various hang-ups and she encourages him to go find a therapist or a girlfriend, ideally both. It's the most naturalistic acting in the entire film, conveying a sort of weary familiarity, that sort of long-term, lived-in relationship where no one feels like pretending anymore.
Then the ex-wife completely disappears from the movie, and so does any gesture towards realism.
Of course the chemistry Gary has with Madison, his new love interest, the aspring femme fatale trying to solicit him for killing her husband, is intoxicating. There are lot of really effective, actually sexy sex scenes no one could possibly accuse of being superfluous, because they also contain most of the character and plot development. The banter is always on fire. From the moment they meet, they're acting a scene, both stepping out of their ordinary roles, entering completely unknown terrain and it's easy to see why roleplay is a kink for many people. It's also easy to see why actors often have affairs on set - closely working together can be a short-cut to intimacy, and there are not many jobs as conducive to intimacy as acting; to create the intended effect, you have to become attuned to each other, you have to pay minute attention, to catch your cues, to calibrate your response. The climax of the movie, the scene that really sells the romance, seals the bond, is not so much the murder these two commit together, but a scene that precedes it, when Gary, in his role as undercover police operative, arrives at Madison's house with a wire, fake-interrogating her, while actually feeding her cues on his smartphone to deceive his colleagues. To make it work, they have to completely submit to each other, each one picking up whatever they other puts down, accepting everything in the spirit of "Yes, and". It's the pure exhilaration of an impro-workshop, of those participants who feel they're pulling it off.
But they are never not acting a scene. It's impossible to imagine them having the sort of conversation Gary has with ex-wife.
posted by sohalt at 11:23 AM on July 26 [2 favorites]
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We were able to see this last night in theaters, and it was a bunch of fun. I walked in blind so wasn't sure if this was going to be Linklater's the Killer. It was something much different than that, but a huge blast. It was very funny, and Arjona and Powell's chemistry was a bunch of fun. I really loved how as he gets more involved in this world, his teaching gets better, it's such a funny, subtle gag. Also, how much I wasn't sure where the film was going. Was he going to start taking clients for real? Was someone going to get out and come after him? I'm glad they played all of that pretty much straight.
Did anyone else feel very nervous in the climax? I was so worried she and Jaspar were working for the cops to trap him and that the drugs were all a ruse. Then with the focus and shot on the single apple, movie time wise I then was worried that was poisoned.
It does walk an interesting line. In most movies them having sex above a dead cop would be signs of depravity or at least moral failings, but here it's rewarded. I didn't hate it per se, but thought it was an interesting choice.
posted by Carillon at 10:00 AM on June 7 [7 favorites]