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.     

Between Two Worlds (Entre Deux Mondes)

 

Director Emmanuel Carrère

The director on the set

ensemble cast

Florence Aubenas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Between Two Worlds (Entre Deux Mondes)             B                                                             aka:  Ouistreham                                                                                                                       France  (106 mi)  2021  ‘Scope  d: Emmanuel Carrère

The Great Recession of 2008 was a global economic downturn that devastated world financial markets as well as the banking and real estate industries, especially in the United States and Western Europe.  Bank foreclosures worldwide caused millions of people to lose their life savings, their jobs, and their homes, where after a period of economic stagnation in 2008, France suffered the longest period of economic decline and its worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, wiping out all economic growth since 2000.  When a financial crisis of that magnitude disrupts an economy, it’s followed by a panicked wave of unemployment, where one in five employees lost their jobs, basically losing everything, many never obtaining real work again, instead roaming through a labyrinthian network of temporary jobs, wandering from place to place, season to season, like migratory workers.  The effects of the downturn were felt for many more years.  From 2010 through 2014 multiple European countries, including Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Cyprus, defaulted on their national debts, forcing the European Union to provide them with “bailout” loans and cash investments, compelling them to implement “austerity” measures to repay their debts.  That is the backdrop to this film, a social realist, working class drama that recalls Chloé Zhao’s 2021 #5 Film of the Year Nomadland (2020), continually blurring the lines between fiction and documentary.  Loosely based on the 2010 non-fiction book Le Quai de Ouistreham (The Night Cleaner) by Belgian-born French journalist Florence Aubenas, reporting in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis, having spent months with a fake identity working undercover as a cleaner to investigate and expose the hardships of workers at the marginalized end of society, whose services are essential, yet they remain invisible to a larger society that simply overlooks what they do and chooses not to see them, something along the lines of George Orwell’s autobiographical first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, which details prolonged periods of hunger, taking odd jobs to avoid destitution, and living among the working poor.  Actress Juliette Binoche, who also produced the film, persisted for years in getting this brought to the screen, taking most of a decade to realize the project, eventually persuading the author to agree to an adaptation.  Aubenas hand-picked the director who co-wrote the screenplay along with his ex-wife, journalist Hélène Devynck, agreeing to have the film adapted only if Emmanuel Carrère, winner of numerous literary awards and one of the country’s best-known authors of literary nonfiction, would direct, making his first film since 2005.  Carrère writes nonfiction, or what he calls “nonfiction novels,” an unclassifiable mix of personal history, reportage, philosophy, and theology, where his books combine journalistic reporting with first-person confession. While preparing for her role in Leos Carax’s The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) (1991), Binoche spent some time as a homeless person in order to bring a truthfulness to her role.  According to Carrère, “Juliette navigated the actors at least as much as I did, not by giving them instructions, but through the way she acted with them.”  Shot by Patrick Blossier, who also shot Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) (1985), there’s nothing picturesque about this film, where there are many grey and rainy days, typical of northern France, finding ourselves in a dreary landscape of port infrastructures, bureaucratic office spaces, concrete buildings, highways, and supermarkets, while the non-intrusive musical soundtrack was composed by Mathieu Lamboley.

At the center of the film is Juliette Binoche, stripped of all artifices as the undercover journalist Marianne Winckler, a prestigious Parisian journalist in a fictionalized version of Aubenas, inspired by the process she devised in writing the book.  This stylistic maneuver has been used before by Sam Fuller in his savagely disturbing SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963), where an ambitious reporter feigns madness in order to be committed to a mental institution where he intends to uncover the truth behind a murder that happened there, a film that grows dangerously unhinged and grotesquely surreal.  This film plays it unerringly straight, expressed with a blistering real-life intensity, becoming a social critique of class differences, in line with the neo-realist work of Ken Loach or the Dardenne brothers, though lacking their biting sharpness and unique storytelling ability, resulting in an exposé that paints a disturbing portrait of what this backbreaking and exploitative work is like for people struggling to survive during a global recession.  At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, people who stocked the shelves or worked the cash registers in a supermarket or provided for patients in hospitals were applauded, as suddenly everyone was aware of how valuable their work can be, even if you ignore them in everyday life.  However, more than two years later, their mundane achievements are largely taken for granted again, still performing essential work, but largely underappreciated and ignored.  In order to achieve as much authenticity as possible, Binoche is surrounded by a cast of unprofessionals, some of whom actually do this work for a living, yet what really stands out is that Binoche defers to them, allowing the spotlight to shine on her co-stars, the workers of the thankless jobs Marianne is trying to get to know and understand, whose work is defined by daily humiliation, time pressure, and poor pay.  While the film delivers a bleak message, it shifts its attention to the relationships Marianne forms with the people she meets, largely women, where she ends up developing close friendships in the six months they worked together, while also contending with the job-seeking Cédric (Didier Pupin), who is always looking for a woman at his side, and routinely flirts with her.  Having to answer why there is a 23-year gap in her resumé, her standard answer is that she was a stay-at-home mom whose husband left her, forcing her to fend for herself in a workplace competing for jobs with people half her age.  Now she’s broke and willing to do anything, looking for a fresh start in Caen, a small city in Normandy where she doesn’t know anyone, receiving training as a temp for a cleaning service, fired almost immediately from her first assignment for failing to show complete subservience toward an impatient supervisor, eventually assigned to a night team cleaning the cabins on the ferry that runs between the small port of Ouistreham in northwestern France and Portsmouth, England, strategically timed with the unloading of departing passengers and loading of arriving passengers.  About a half hour into the film, we learn Marianne’s backstory is completely fabricated, discovered by her contact at the unemployment agency who thought she looked familiar, eventually recognizing her, having read her last book. Marianne insists on taking temp work only, never taking a job away from someone else in need, so the counselor agrees to maintain her secrecy, with much of the rest of the film playing out like a thriller, awaiting the inevitable disclosure of her true identity.  The weakness of the film is it feels relentlessly downbeat and overly one note, with relatively few surprises, where watching a cleaning crew at work is not what drives viewers to the cinema.  

In the opening scene at the unemployment office, Marianne is overshadowed by the appearance of Chrystèle, played by Hélène Lambert, an undiscovered talent who is the overriding force of the film, literally stealing every scene, showing great dramatic flair as a free-spirited single mother who abruptly cuts in line and insists on seeing someone, facing potential homelessness due to a clerical error, as she complied with their directions but was cut off welfare, with claims they never received the unemployment form that she hand-delivered, now having no funds to feed her three kids.  From the look of sheer exasperation on her face, it’s abundantly clear this is not the first time something like this has happened.  The combative ruckus she creates draws attention, something described as Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers in Tom Wolfe’s sarcastically incisive 1970 essay, but it exemplifies the kinds of things that can happen, a bureaucratic error for some, just a glitch in the system, but a life threatening situation for others.  This takes us into the lurid world of people living from pay check to pay check, a group that sees things from a completely different perspective than the middle class who have options, as they are protected by a safety net.  The people on the bottom do the most ruthlessly backbreaking work, with no days off, subject to termination if they’re late or miss a day, with the longest hours and lowest wages and little else to show for it, having lost all illusions and hopes in life.  While these are French citizens, the situation for immigrants is much tougher, as we see the police harassing the Sudanese homeless on the streets, taking their blankets and sandals that help fend off the morning cold, appearing like shadows wandering the port in the dim of light.  The film is largely a choreographed precision of rhythms in carrying out what amounts to the most grueling work, arriving in the dark of the morning just before dawn, routinely cleaning up other people’s shit and vomit, assigned to the “commando operation” where they’re on the clock cleaning 230 cabins in just 90-minutes before the ship departs, where they have to make beds, clean toilets, and wipe the floor, the vast majority of whom are women, allowing just 3 to 4-minutes per room.  The speed and repetitive routine the work requires takes a severe physical toll on the body, where the job satisfaction is non-existent, yet in a competitive market workers falling by the wayside are easily replaced.  Some of this resembles Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023), but there’s no time for reflection, as it’s a crash course in nonstop work.  Working as a team alongside Chrystèle and the love-smitten 18-year old Marilou (Léa Carne), who naïvely believes this is only a stage in her life, Marianne is occasionally seen stepping aside to jot notes in a notebook, entering an increasingly difficult ethical dilemma, at times feeling like a traitor, as the other workers who befriend and accept her as one of their own will have to eventually learn she has betrayed their trust.  There is an internal thread with Binoche providing a dry, existential narration of what she discovers, but also pleasant scenes of taking diversions to the beach with Chrystèle, something she’s obviously unfamiliar with, where she may as well be visiting an alien planet, having no concept whatsoever of the idea of taking time for relaxation, with literally zero down time in her life.  Rather than a collective exposé of an exploited workforce, much of this turns into a character profile piece on Chrystèle, where there are heartwarming scenes of Marianne spending time together with her kids, actually celebrating her birthday, where she’s generously gifted a necklace that she treasures, as it’s something they clearly cannot afford.  Ending on an ambiguous note, with no clear answers, her secret is exposed when the two worlds collide in the most unforeseen manner, a completely awkward moment that blindsides Chrystèle, immediately growing bitter at the façade of work and friendship, feeling like she took advantage of their relationship after opening up her life and offering real insight into the role of an underclass in French society.  Whatever positives may come from the book, hoping to make the invisible visible, she’s the one most affected by the pretense of somebody pretending to be someone they’re not, shattered to the core by the deception, questioning the moral conundrum of how lies can significantly affect the pursuit of truth, and whether friendships can transcend the seemingly insurmountable divide between class barriers, as unlike Marianne, who returns to a comfortable bougie life she can’t even imagine, Chrystèle has no fallback position, literally no other options but to succumb to the agonizing abyss of an endless cycle of mind-numbing work.