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
