Hit Man

 

Director Richard Linklater

Linklater on the set

Linklater with Glen Powell

Linklater directing a scene with Powell and Adria Arjona

Journalist Skip Hollandsworth

HIT MAN                   B+                                                                                                             USA  (115 mi)  2023  ‘Scope  d: Richard Linklater

What Johnson knows, perhaps better than anyone else, is the capability of people, given certain circumstances, to do absolutely savage things to each another.                                                  —Hit Man, Skip Hollandsworth from Texas Monthly, October 2001

While it’s not as funny as the outrageously hilarious Martin McDonagh hit man crime thriller In Bruges (2008), Linklater takes us back into the highly satiric, black comedy crime drama of Bernie (2011), which is largely a love letter to the East Texas region where Linklater grew up, based upon a Skip Hollandsworth article the director read in The Texas Monthly, January 1998, Midnight in the Garden of East Texas.  Hollandsworth, a crime journalist and editor of the magazine, again provided the source material for this film as well, very loosely based on his 2001 Texas Monthly article Hit Man about a man named Gary Johnson (who passed away in 2022), a psychology college professor who moonlighted for the Houston Police Department as a surveillance tech guy, transported here to the city of New Orleans for the movie, adding a few stylish twists, like a setting on Allen Toussaint Boulevard, for instance, complete with brief excerpts of vintage Big Easy songs, music that represents that festive state of mind of the city, as there’s a sly, tongue-in-cheek hilarity in play when Johnson turns into a fake hit man, with Linklater making one of the most joyously entertaining films of his career.  In the 60’s Johnson spent a year in Vietnam as a military policeman overseeing convoys, embarking on a domestic law enforcement career when he returned home, starting as a sheriff’s deputy in Louisiana in the 1970’s, performing undercover work related to drug busts.  His real interest, however, was teaching college psychology, moving to Houston in 1981, but was rejected in the psychology doctoral program, instead taking a job as an investigator for the district attorney’s office, going undercover when the police received a tip that a woman was plotting to kill her husband.  Dressed as a biker, using a fake name and identity, while wired for sound, he posed as a hit man for hire, getting the woman to confess to her intentions, making an arrest after receiving an initial down payment, where she was eventually sentenced to 80 years in prison, the first of literally hundreds of murder-for-hire sting operations (most turned out to be unfounded) that led to more than 60 arrests.  The surprising aspect is that most come from people with no criminal background, ordinary law-abiding citizens with no run-ins with the law, yet looking for a quick fix to eliminate the source of their frustrations, revealing an underbelly of pent-up anger that reflects the current state of a nation teetering on the edge of violence.  Linklater turns this into a hilarious screwball comedy costume drama, as Johnson, played by co-writer and co-producer Glen Powell from Everybody Wants Some !! (2016), expertly changes his personality and uses various disguises (à la Jerry Lewis) custom designed to cater to the interests of each specific client.  Powell is an Austin, Texas actor Linklater first started working with in FAST FOOD NATION (2006) when he was still in high school, but he lights up the screen here, exhibiting extreme confidence in being ruthless, displaying phenomenal range as an actor, yet also a knack for improvising on the spot, Hit Man - Official Clip (2024) Glen Powell, Adria Arjona | IGN ... YouTube (1:14), continually probing different levels of his character, where a montage of these scenes is typically followed by a dopey looking mug shot of the perpetrators after the arrest.     

Johnson is seen as a nerdy, introverted guy who simply doesn’t stand out, as he lives alone with a goldfish and two cats (Ego and Id), leading a quiet life, often seen bird watching or working in his garden, seemingly comfortable with who he is, as he reads Shakespeare, books on Carl Jung, and even Gandhi, with his neighbors reporting he’s always polite.  In his classroom, his philosophic teachings are about identity, weaving together lectures on Freud and Nietzsche and the nature of the self, questioning who you are and how you can transform yourself into a better version of yourself, encouraging them to get out of their shells and “live dangerously,” which is ironic as the students view him as this utterly conventional guy driving a Honda Civic, so completely forgettable that he’s nearly invisible, the complete opposite of a man of action.  His first marriage failed because he was just too boring, though he and his ex-wife continue to maintain a close friendship as they share common interests.  In the undercover work that he performs, he’s the guy sitting in the van ensuring that the mics work for surveillance, providing the necessary recording tapes that can be used in court.  But this all changes when Jasper (Austin Amello, also from Everybody Wants Some !!), the dirty undercover cop who is normally sent in on these operations, gets suspended for questionable on-duty behavior, as video of him pummeling teenagers has gone viral, showing no remorse afterwards, believing they deserved it, so Gary is essentially forced into the role of meeting with the suspect.  Rather than avoid responsibility or passively shirk from his duties, he immediately transforms into this edgy persona, calling himself Ron the hit man, willing to do whatever the situation calls for.  Of course, his job is to convince the suspect that he’s professionally qualified to discreetly handle the dirty work, setting their mind at ease, playing into their fantasies, as he’s simply the guy who can get things done.  His coworkers are shocked at what they hear, hard to believe it’s the same guy, as he expresses a vigorous sense of urgency, easily adopting the tough guy language each situation calls for, something that seemingly only happens in the movies.  Think Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum, where they are smooth talkers who exude masculinity, willing to back up their threats or promises with results.  After a string of arrests, he’s the new police darling, the exact opposite of Jasper’s shortcomings, who’s an embarrassment to the force, while Ron is making them all look good.  Even when Jasper returns, he’s relegated to a supporting role, as Ron is just too good to be true and they don’t want to break his streak.  Jasper, of course, is pissed, and continually looks for an opportunity to undermine him, but Ron is a smooth operator who’s like a chameleon, as he simply transforms himself into whatever’s needed, telling them what they want to hear, talking the same language of his suspects, so relaxed and self-assured, blending perfectly into the scenery of a would-be hit man.  Even the students in his classroom notice the transformation, as he’s suddenly cool and captivating, where his newfound charisma becomes the talk of the school.  

The film goes off the rails when one suspect, a terrified woman caught up in an abusive marriage with an over-controlling husband she wants to escape from, is a former beauty queen, Madison (Adria Arjona), that Ron steers away from making her confession, actually convincing her to change her mind, urging her to leave her husband, to take the money and start a new life, a sympathetic switcheroo that immediately captures the attention of his coworkers, especially Jasper, who finds it such a rookie move, and so unprofessional.  But what stands out is the chemistry between them (“Chivalry may be dead, but I didn't kill it.”), as not long afterwards a steamy relationship ensues between them, which is the way she chooses to celebrate her newfound freedom, veering into the same territory as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) or Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), where you keep waiting for the double cross.  Her intoxicating sexuality brings out the best in Ron, as she exudes the femme fatale sexuality in so many crime stories, where she may actually be role-playing herself, while Gary is equally surprised by the sudden machismo coming from Ron, making him do things he wouldn’t ordinarily do, yet both make a convincing couple as things get more complicated and dangerous.  When they accidently run into her ex-husband Ray (Evan Holtzman) on the street, a violent confrontation leads to immediate threats, causing Ron to pull out a gun and stick it in his face, causing him to back off, a move that positively thrills Madison, who claims no one has ever stuck up for her like that before, leading to more bedroom seduction titillation, entering even more murky waters as we go down the road of a film noir landscape.  However, when you look at Gary back in the precinct, he’s just an ordinary guy that could easily be mistaken as an office clerk, where nothing leads you to believe what he does for a living.  This split personality that results from his continued role-playing becomes part of his existential dilemma, amusingly expressed in his ongoing voiceover narration, as he’s trying to figure out who he actually is, wondering which version will prevail.  Pondering his own identity mirrors what he teaches in class, embracing what Jung describes as his “shadow side,” but the wigs, changing accents, and multiple identities he employs add an uncommon element to this film, as we never really know what to expect, with photos of real-world disguises used by Johnson shown over the final credits, making very clear what was made up, taking some surprising turns that he was to twist his way out of, like some mythical labrynthian puzzle.  Mixing crime, romance, and comedy, Linklater, one of the more influential directors of American independent cinema, always has such a keen sense of telling original stories in a touching and humorous way, and seems to be having a blast with this film, a throwback to the feelgood movies that Paul Newman and Robert Redford used to make, where he ends up channeling Frank Capra’s ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944), having an infectious quality that is hard not to like, doing what few films can do, blending intelligence with a clever flair for the absurd, told with a comic panache that is a constant delight.     

Rebels of the Neon God (Qing shao nian nuo zha)

 

Director Tsai Ming-liang

Lee Kang-shen with the director

REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (Qing shao nian nuo zha)              B+                                         Taiwan  (109 mi)  1992

Do you have nothing better to do with yourself?     —Mother (Lu Hsiao-ling)

In the eighties and early nineties Taiwan witnessed an unprecedented cinematic portrayal of the contemporary urban sensibility, perhaps best reflected by Edward Yang’s modernist exploration of the alienation of the individual in the barren urban landscape of contemporary society, with his films emphasizing psychological complexity, That Day, On the Beach (Hai tan de yi tian) (1983), Taipei Story (Qing mei zhu ma) (1985), The Terrorizers (Kong bu fen zi) (1986), and A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), or the adolescent street gangs of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s autobiographical A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi) (1985), yet also the hauntingly quiet poetry of Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986).  At the time, government film grants allowed budding directors like Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien to get their start, creating the Taiwan New Wave, breaking away from locally made melodramas or kung fu movies in favor of location shooting, long takes, and deliberate editing to reflect the rapidly changing world around them.  Born in Malaysia, having moved around from school to school, typically the kid nobody wanted to talk to, finding it difficult to make new friends, Tsai moved to Taiwan in 1977 at the age of 20 to discover an emerging generation in the thrall of Western values, where the soaring high- tech economic growth drove people to the cities, creating a society filled with contradictions in a clash between the old and the new, enrolling in Taipei’s Chinese Culture University, majoring in Dramatic Art, where he was exposed to European art cinema, including the aesthetics of Truffaut, Antonioni, Bresson, and Fassbinder.  After writing and directing several plays, Tsai went on to work in television, where it was during the making of The Kid, a 1991 TV film, when he was scouting for an actor that he encountered Lee Kang-sheng, who would eventually star in every single one of his feature films.  Writing his own scripts, Tsai’s characters are trapped in the banality of their existence, desperately trying to overcome their loneliness and inability to connect with others, making films that are distinctive in capturing the absurd frustrations and numbness of urban alienation, using long silences and almost no camera movement, eloquently shot by Liao Pen-jung, Tsai’s longtime collaborator, where his aesthetic is essentially minimalist and existentialist to the core.  In a strange twist of fate, this film was not released in America until 23 years after it was made, digitally restored as part of a traveling retrospective assembled only after the critical success of Stray Dogs (Jiao you) (2013).  The words Tsai Ming-liang and realistic action adventure wouldn’t usually be found in the same sentence, much less the same movie, instead we’d expect to see melancholic actor Lee Kang-sheng barely uttering a word, along with deluges of rain, a love for old style movie theaters, an uncommon interest in sex, the inside of the exact same apartments featuring a familiar rice pot on the table, in this case either his own or his sister’s apartment, and plenty of long slow takes, occasionally leading to an offbeat punch line, most often expressed through Tati or Chaplinesque silent film era sight gags.  Unlike his Taiwanese compatriots Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang who thrive on narrative detachment, Tsai’s films possess near perfect comic timing, not afraid to spend minutes setting up a single laugh.  This film actually foreshadows by a decade Jia Zhang-ke’s UNKNOWN PLEASURES (2002), as both are unflinching looks at alienated youth, one in Datong, a large city in the northern Shanxi province in China, almost to Inner Mongolia, the other in the bustling city of Taipei, both shot in near documentary form, featuring plenty of long tracking shots of excitable kids on motorbikes frenetically exploring their individual freedom only to discover their own restless energy turning against themselves, as there’s little hope for the future.  

After an amusing opening that oddly enough involves a mathematics compass and a cockroach, REBELS follows the exploits of two petty criminals Ah-tze and Ah-ping, Chen Chao-jung and Jen Chang-ben, who are seen expertly looting the cash boxes from several telephone booths before spending their idle time in a video arcade where Lee Kang-sheng by chance happens to notice them.  This is ironic, as that’s exactly how Tsai met Lee Kang-sheng, the phenomenally gifted non-professional actor who would not only become the camera’s focus for the rest of his career, but he would come to define Tsai’s work in the same way Jean-Pierre Léaud was associated with the work of Truffaut in the 60’s and early 70’s.  What immediately stands out is the depiction of urban malaise, where globalization has created small cracks for those living on the fringes of society, where we see parked scooters bordering the busy streets, and narrow lanes jam-packed with food stalls and hawkers selling their wares, with giant billboards advertising various products, as people must compete within this congestion for every little ounce of space.  Shot in the Southwest section of the city known as the West Gate District, the seedy neighborhood where Tsai lived as a student when he came to Taipei, so it has some personal significance, as it was known as a teenage district, the center of Taiwan cinema, with as many as 37 theaters clustered into the compact neighborhood in the early 90’s, becoming the neighborhood where he was introduced to world cinema.  At the time of the shoot, it was an old, run down, and crowded neighborhood under construction that has now been transformed into a worldwide shopping district, attracting more than 3 million shoppers per month, turned into a pedestrian area where vehicles are prohibited on weekends and holidays, where the film is an homage to the neighborhood’s nostalgic history.  Focusing on the details of daily habits, offering insight into the lives of listless young men in crumbling inner cities, Tsai’s characters are often engaged in trivial jobs that hold little meaning, giving rise to petty thieves who prey on the periphery.  Not only are there several quick cuts of bored teenagers dangling cigarettes out of their mouths, also (drawing from Hollywood) an image of Lee standing in front of an iconic movie poster of James Dean from Rebel Without a Cause (1955) which looms above him at the video arcade (though his character is more akin to Sal Mineo’s Plato), but there’s a pulsating, bass heavy musical soundtrack by Huang Shu-jun, the only canned music in any of his films, used quite effectively here as it matches the portrait of Taipei as a dingy, neon-lit wasteland, Tsai Ming-liang - Rebels of the Neon God 1992 YouTube (1:19), where disconnected relationships are short-lived and pointless, and meaningless violence can erupt at any minute over the least provocation.  Of course there’s a girl, Ah-kuei (Wang Yu-wen), the bored, yet hot to trot, short-skirted, roller rink attendant who tightens skates with a few pounds of a hammer, who flirtatiously tries to interest Ah-tze, but nothing holds his attention for long as his mind wanders with that typical male urban syndrome common in video arcades known as attention deficit disorder.  It’s amazing the girl gives these creeps the time of day, but she keeps coming back for more.  Lee Kang-sheng as Hsiao-kang hatches his own interest in them after witnessing Ah-tze brazenly destroy his father’s outside cab mirror with a tire iron, a senseless act that does get to the heart of what this film is about, a lifetime of a neverending series of senseless acts.   

In preparation to taking the standardized college entrance exams, Lee drops out of cram school and pockets the refunded tuition money, leaving his parents who paid for it outraged, knowing where reckless irresponsible acts will lead him, especially when his mother, invoking her folk beliefs, thinks he’s been infected by an evil spirit, describing him as the “reincarnation of the Neon God.”  About the same age as Ah-tze, Lee is drawn to him, shadowing his every move, as their lives mirror one another, often seen paired together in parallel shots making identical gestures, and while they lead very different lives, it’s clear the aimlessness and uncertainty of their futures are connected in this study of disaffected Taipei youth, offering insight into the lives of lost young men living in urban wastelands.  While Lee is physically and psychologically confined to a tiny room in his parent’s home, subject to their rules and jurisdiction, Ah-tze has apparent mobility and freedom to go where he pleases, yet it’s largely symbolic, as both move in restricted space that can feel suffocating.  The audiences in Tsai’s films are able to see things the characters can’t, as they’re too busy occupying the cramped space they live in, while viewers sitting at a distance who have the opportunity to observe what happens within that space.  Using an anti-narrative technique, feeling more like various slices of life episodes strewn together, the film explores how Lee attempts to push the boundaries of his physical constrictions, using a carefully choreographed visual design where the paths of two characters are constantly crisscrossing, Rebels of the Neon God (1992) - MEETING YouTube (1:39).  Ah-tze’s apartment continually floods with sewage water backing up from the drain, one of Tsai’s most common themes, where throughout the film he amusingly sloshes his way through the water which has a mirror-like reflection on the ceiling.  When he does a good deed, the water mysteriously flows back down the drain, but don’t expect that condition to last long.  The kinetic energy in this film is highly unusual for Tsai, a style he’s never returned to, instead becoming enamored with extended takes, but really the movie is a mysterious interconnection of several different Taipei-based storylines, the two goofs and a girl, rounds of casual sex, an elevator that always stops on the wrong floor, a dysfunctional family unit that never once feels like home, and Lee Kang-sheng slowly exacting his revenge, trashing Ah-tze’s scooter, cutting the seat and tires, spray painting AIDS on the side, while pouring glue into the ignition switch, which brings him a moment of temporary ecstasy, but ultimately a profound sadness at the realization of just how aloof and isolated he is from anyone else’s life, which is the true nature of any Lee Kang-sheng character.  The real irony here is that the two goofs have a love interest, someone who actually wants to love them, but their hedonistic, self-centered lives leave them no place for love, so they casually throw it all away as if it were worthless, replaceable parts.  This single act of throwing away what is most meaningful in life is similarly reflected back in all the less significant instances when they’ve done exactly the same thing, where the totality of arrogant disregard and nonchalance leaves them with no meaningful connections in the future.     

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