Monthly Archives: November 2023

  • Hit Man

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Linklater (2023)

    Like an earlier Richard Linklater film, Bernie (2011), this one derives from a Texas Monthly ‘long-form feature’ by Skip Hollandsworth about a real person.  In Hit Man, showing at the London Film Festival, that person is Gary Johnson, introduced in Hollandsworth’s 2001 piece about him as:

    ‘… the most sought-after professional killer in Houston. In the past decade, he’s been hired to kill more than sixty people. But if you pay him to rub out a cheating spouse or an abusive boss, you’d better watch your own back: He works for the cops.’

    Linklater and Hollandsworth shared the screenplay credit for Bernie.  Hit Man is co-written by the director and the film’s star, Glen Powell (who was also in Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)).  The most interesting thing about this new film – for this viewer, just about the only interesting thing – is that it’s thought-provoking about aspects of black comedy and of self-realisation stories.

    The film’s Gary Johnson (Powell) has been relocated from Texas to Louisiana.  He teaches philosophy and psychology at New Orleans University.  An IT whizz, he also works as a part-time wiretapper for a team of undercover officers in the local police.  The team majors in rooting out individuals looking to hire contract killers.  Husbands wanting to dispose of their faithless wives, wives looking for revenge on violent husbands, etc, are lured into a meeting with a detective posing as a hit man; in due course, his colleagues arrive on the scene to make an arrest.  When the usual pretend assassin, Jason (Austin Amelio), is suspended for inappropriate behaviour, an urgent replacement is needed and Gary instructed to step in.  Surely this mild-mannered, bespectacled nerd – a divorcee who shares his home with two cats and whose hobby is bird-watching (presumably when the cats are otherwise engaged) – is comically miscast as a supposed contract killer?  Jason, still hanging around the office, derides the idea.  Nicer police colleagues like Claudette (Retta) and Phil (Sanjay Rao) are sceptical.  But Gary creates for himself a hit man persona:  when he meets with ‘clients’, he’s lean-and-mean, decisive Ron (never mind that, this side of the Atlantic anyway, Ron connotes lack of threat or excitement more than Gary does).  He takes to his new role like a duck to water.

    Richard Linklater quickly sets the tone for proceedings.  Hit Man begins with a jaunty jazz tune on the soundtrack and a legend announcing ‘a somewhat true story’ on the screen; Gary’s voiceover tells us his cats are called Ego and Id.  The tone, in other words, is mischievous, rather pleased with itself.  It’s also, to be fair to Linklater, consistent.  His direction, along with his and Glen Powell’s script, integrates seemingly grim subject matter with light-hearted treatment of it, thus avoiding the frequent tendency of black comedy on screen to switch between levity and gravity as it suits.  It’s maybe just a matter of personal taste that I never found Hit Man funny.  Whenever the protagonist successfully completes a sting, Linklater shows a mug shot of the dupe which then spins round; a good part of the NFT1 audience seemed to laugh each one of the many times this happened.  In conversation with the dupe, Gary/Ron will have impressed them with stories of his lethal bravado – how he’ll put a stick of dynamite in a victim’s mouth or throw severed fingers out of his car window at five-mile intervals.  What seems meant to be funny here isn’t the gory details per se but the gormless gullibility of the person regaled with them – regardless of their sometimes desperate circumstances.  It’s one thing for a black comedy to be subversive by lampooning exemplars of authority – and Linklater does poke fun at the police.  But a battered wife or female partner who decides that killing the perpetrator is the only way to make the battering stop is hardly an establishment figure.  Why does Hit Man seem to think ridiculing her is hilarious, too?

    Because it’s glib.  Gary hits problems in his new line of work when he encounters a woman trying to get rid of her abusive husband:  the difference is that this one – Madison Masters (Adria Arjona) – is glamorous.  Gary/Ron doesn’t want to get her arrested; he wants to see her again – and again.  He’s also worried that, while Madison seems attracted to Ron, she may be less keen on Gary.  He starts lying to his fellow cops about how he’s planning to entrap Madison, and to Madison about who he is.  Glen Powell’s smart starring performance is perfectly aligned with Hit Man’s shallow fluency.  (The most likeable work in the film comes from Retta, best known in America as a stand-up and whose comic timing is certainly very good:  Retta’s Claudette can be mordant but is just as often puzzled.)  Although Powell, with a look of the young William Hurt about him, isn’t implausible as Gary the geek, his specs seem like a disguise from the start.  (They’re essentially the same specs that prim secretary-type girls in old-time Hollywood used to wear before removing them, and letting down the hair they’d had in a tight bun, to reveal their beauty.)  Not only does Linklater give plenty of screen time to sexy scenes for Ron and Madison but Gary gradually fades from view even when he’s not pretending to be Ron.  Deep into the film, one of his female students, sotto voce, asks another, ‘When did our professor get to be hot?’  The question is understandable.  By this stage, it’s hard to remember that Gary was ever anything else.

    ‘What if your self is a construct?’ Gary asks his philosophy (or psychology) class.  By discovering his ‘hot’ side, he also discovers who he can be and decides to be:  at the end of the story, he’s living in domestic bliss with Madison, to whom he’s come clean.  They’ve had a child together and own a dog (she doesn’t like cats).  Madison shot dead her husband, Ray (Evan Holtzman), but that’s OK because she‘s even hotter than Gary and Ray was a ratbag.  It doesn’t matter either that she learned to use a gun through a bit of target practice supervised by Ron.  Jason has also come to a bad end – again, no problem:  he was a racist misogynist, railed against cancel culture and, trying to blackmail Gary and Madison, eventually proved to be venal, too; Jason’s cop colleagues are glad to be rid of him.  Their overlapping themes invite comparison between Hit Man and Ernst De Geer’s The Hypnosis (2023), which I’d seen at the London Film Festival just a few days previously.  In terms of what they set out to do, both movies are successfully realised.  De Geer’s is, as well as far funnier, much tougher-minded.  Linklater’s is a facile celebration of seizing the day and whatever identity you fancy – provided that, of course, it’s the right sort of identity.

    11 October 2023

  • Nyad

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin (2023)

    As the years and roles go by, it looks decreasingly likely that Annette Bening will win the Academy Award that her talents richly deserve.  Glenn Close, of course, is regarded as the prime living example of always-the-Oscar-bridesmaid syndrome and the numbers don’t lie:  Close’s eight acting nominations without a win is a women’s all-time record (equalling the score of Peter O’Toole, who tops the men’s division).  But although Bening has been nominated only four times to date, it’s rougher justice that she’s always been passed over (and not just because she’s the finer actress).  Whereas I don’t think any Close performance deserved the Oscar for the year in question, Annette Bening should have won for American Beauty (1999) and probably also for The Kids Are All Right (2010), overrated though that film is.  On paper, Nyad, in which Bening plays the title character, looks a suitable vehicle to change her Oscar fortunes.  It’s the story of real-life, never-say-die heroism:  in 2013 Diana Nyad, sixty-four years old and at her fifth attempt, became the first person to swim from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida without the protection of a ‘shark cage’ – a distance of some 110 miles, requiring over fifty hours of continuous swimming.  What’s more, preparing for and making this film must have been, for sixty-five-year-old Bening, an exceptionally arduous physical undertaking.  This combination of well-established ingredients for Oscar success surely won’t be enough.  Nyad, despite getting one of the gala premiere slots at the London Film Festival, is just too formulaic, thin and clumsy.

    The wife-and-husband directing team of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin is best known for their extreme sports documentaries, especially Free Solo (which, in 2019, did win an Academy Award).  Although their track record might seem to qualify them for Nyad, neither has directed drama before.  The resulting film doesn’t suggest they’ve any talent for it although inexperience may have been what led them wrongly to believe the screenplay they were working with – by Julia Cox, whose first cinema script this is – was up to scratch.  Adapted from Diana Nyad’s 2015 memoir Find a Way, Cox’s screenplay quickly establishes the frequently argumentative but enduring friendship of Diana and Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster); it then gets to work on the heroine’s big swim project.  In her youth, Diana Nyad was a renowned marathon swimmer; retiring in 1979 at the age of thirty, she embarked on a long, successful career in TV and radio sports journalism.  (Perhaps thanks to their background in documentaries, Vasarhelyi and Chin are happy, instead of staging reconstructions, to insert library film of the real Nyad swimming in the 1970s.)  We get that it’s a combination of her sixtieth birthday and the sentiment of a Mary Oliver poem that tells Diana to seize the day and resume endurance swimming (the Oliver lines ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?’ are repeated more often than necessary).  We get that the Cuba to Florida swim is, for Diana, unfinished business – something she tried and failed to complete in her late twenties.  Beyond that, the storytelling is uninformative.  There’s next to nothing about the psychological effect of her first abortive Havana-Key West swim.  It evidently didn’t cause her immediate retirement:  the following year, according to Wikipedia, Nyad ‘set a world record for distance swimming (both men and women) over open water … [of] 102 miles’.  Yet when she goes to a local swimming pool in 2009 we learn from her conversation with Bonnie that this is the first time in three decades that Diana has swum at all.  How come?

    Nyad certainly doesn’t waste time getting its protagonist back in the ocean.  Not many screen minutes after a few lengths at the local pool, she’s all set to go from Havana.  Unless you know more of the facts than I did when I watched the film, this speed of progress is disorienting.  The brief plot synopsis on the LFF website makes clear that Diana will succeed in her quest:  how are they going to spin the story out to two hours?  The answer, obviously enough, is by giving plenty of screen time to all four of her attempts on the swim between 2011 and 2013.  These include some beautiful marine and underwater images by Claudio Miranda (who has form in this kind of cinematography:  he shot Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012)); Diana suffers asthma attacks, jellyfish and Portuguese-man-of-war stings and the close attention of sharks.  After each failure, there’s dejection and increasingly big fall-outs with Bonnie, who is Diana’s trainer as well as her cheerleader, and/or John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans), Nyad’s navigator.  But the film, despite that brisk start, moves more and more slowly.  Since the eventual outcome is certain, Nyad has to be an engrossing character study to stay interesting.  In this respect, it’s dead in the water.

    For Tegan Vevers, whose name is on the LFF synopsis of Nyad, the identity of the heroine is enough to render individual characterisation superfluous:  ‘With so few contemporary films centred around older female protagonists,’ writes Vevers, ‘this beautifully made celebration of a queer female athlete in her 60s is nothing less than a sublime cinematic gift’.  In fact, queerness counts for very little here (beyond ticking a box).  We gather that Diana and Bonnie are lesbian but were an item only briefly and many years ago.  They’re friends, not lovers; their other interactions throughout the film are almost entirely with men.  Two of the latter feature in flashbacks to Diana’s childhood (where she’s played by identical twins, Belle and Pearl Darling, at the age of five and by Anna Harriette Pittman at the age of fourteen).  The flashbacks to Diana’s home life are perfunctory (it’s disappointing to learn that her miraculously apt surname was inherited from her stepfather:  she’s not a born water nymph after all).  Those describing her teenage swim years are supposed to be anything but:  it’s alleged that Diana’s coach, Jack Nelson (Eric T Miller), sexually abused her and other girls on the swim team.  The trouble is, such revelations in fact-based drama are by now not only deplorable but predictable – at least when the predator is played and photographed as obviously as he is here.  To make matters worse – more clichéd – Diana recalls an instance of Nelson’s abuse just as she’s being approached by an Atlantic Ocean shark.

    Nyad makes the injustice of Bening’s Oscarlessness salient by partnering her with Jodie Foster.  As Bonnie Stoll, Foster is highly competent but weirdly uninteresting.  That combination runs nearly all the way through her career as an adult performer although it didn’t stop her winning the Best Actress Oscar twice in the space of four years in the late 1980s/early 1990s.  (Foster has never been as extraordinary as she was in Taxi Driver (1976), as a thirteen-year-old.)  Annette Bening gives a forceful, dominant performance but Diana Nyad is too narrow – or narrowly written – a character for her to show even a small part of her range.  Bening’s exhaustion, as Diana finally struggles ashore at Key West, is amazing but it’s a long wait for that.  We know after a couple of minutes of the film that Diana doesn’t suffer fools gladly (or anyone else much), that she’s fiercely single-minded and strong willed.  Since that’s more or less it, she becomes a stentorian, repetitive pain in the neck.  Just about the only amusing detail is her exuberant celebration when another, much younger woman fails in her attempt on the Cuba-Florida marathon.  While Diana is swimming, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin put on the screen a clock/mileometer, showing how long she has been going and the distance covered.  I’m sorry to say that, anxious for Nyad to be over, I gave this visual aid to the film’s progress quite a lot of attention.

    10 October 2023

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