Tag: Richard Linklater

Hit Man

Posted on by victorfraga

For 35 years, Richard Linklater has explored philosophical quandaries around the self, and the cultural factors which shape it, with affable ease. When that laid-back layer is peeled back, flashes of primitive, primarily masculine violence erupt, suggesting the inseparable relationship between ideological formation and culturally sanctioned ferocity. Fitting, then, that his newest film Hit Man packages this dialectic in a Linklaterian hero whose blithe philosophising allows him distance from the brutal archetype he inhabits with total abandon.

That man is Gary Johnson, a real-life college professor who supplements his income providing technical support for the New Orleans Police Department’s Murder-for-Hire outfit. When Jasper (Austin Amelia), a particularly unscrupulous undercover cop, is put on administrative leave, Gary’s suddenly thrust into the spotlight as a hitman tasked with busting his potential clients. His first job as “Ron” is, despite his nerves, a resounding success – almost too much so as he shifts from convincingly describing human dismemberment to marvelling at the wonder of the pileated woodpecker.

Johnson is played by Glen Powell, who also wrote the film’s script, with chameleonic charisma. His affectless geniality masks a passionless view of humanity, one that equivocates it with household pets “begging for scraps.” (Though dogs “don’t apologise for it.”) But Gary’s listlessness is jolted when he meets Madison (Adria Arjona), a beautiful woman who asks him to ax her wealthy husband. He dissuades her, and their subsequent courtship instigates a snowball effect that draws them deeper into a growing web of pleasure and peril.

Hit Man plays with film noir conventions to reflexively comment on the insidious ways cultural images of hitmen from films like Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967) to In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008) have inundated our collective imagination. This semiotic compendium of virile brute force anticipates the fastidious detail Gary puts into his disguises, indulging an unorthodox form of capitalist wish fulfilment for his perps. “I almost envy their naivity and passion,” he remarks. While these scenes have a wicked edge, Linklater’s too empathetic a filmmaker to view those victims with total contempt. He knows all too well how our own naïve passions are shaped by the cultural images we’ve absorbed and fetishised.

Gary confronts that epistemic dilemma’s most dangerous consequences when the twin forces of Jasper and Madison’s volatile ex-husband (Evan Holtzman) complicate his budding romance. Powell and Arjona have palpable chemistry, and their pillow talk is bizarrely sweet in their “contractual” rejection of convention. But the film’s stakes are blunted by its characterisation of Madison herself. Arjona is left to fill in the blanks of a past checkered by trauma, but a third-act twist sells her short by promising growth beyond Gary’s perception of her which, ultimately, fails to meaningfully materialize. “I don’t know how to pretend,” she confesses to a man who shows her how, a conceit that neglects the myriad femmes fatales and their complex motives for mastering duplicity.

While it’s never not an enjoyable watch, thanks largely to Linklater’s assured direction of his accomplished cast, Hit Man only partially realises its Neo-noir potential. The ethical ramifications of the film’s splendidly dark ending do leave an acerbic aftertaste, though the script’s cleverness doesn’t always translate into convincing drama as its characters hurtle toward that denouement. The principal question of how personal and cultural narratives shape identity is a beguiling one, yet the predominantly masculine rhetorical framing stymies its potency.

Hit Man shows at the 61st New York International Film Festival and also at the 67th BFI London Film Festival. It’s out on Netflix soon.

Around the Sun

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

Ever wonder if things may have turned out differently? Would a pithy remark with that boy or girl at the bar have changed anything? This is the power of first impressions, and it is a central notion of Around the Sun.

The film’s lean 89 minutes follows Maggie (Cara Theobold), an estate agent, and Bernard (Gethin Anthony), a film scout, as they walk and talk in a decrepit French chateau. They’re strangers to each other, yet they waste no time with small talk. Their wandering conversations mention everything from ex-partners to existential struggles, but their main topic is Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, a French author who penned Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds while a resident at the chateau.

As Maggie explains the book’s plot – which is a series of celestial conversations between a philosopher and an aristocratic woman – it becomes clear that life is imitating art. Indeed, Maggie and Bernard’s dynamic is reminiscent of Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995), and this conceit has a share of strengths and weaknesses.

The immediate problem lies with the performances; Theobold and Anthony’s dynamic just feels unnatural and scripted, especially when one or the other squirms to point out they meant no offence. However, the quality is redressed as the multiversal narrative unfolds, which splits and reimagines the story several times, presenting the characters with different traits and energies. This redrawing of Maggie and Bernard sees the actors’ performances come into their own, bolstering our hopes for their romance.

After all, these are characters of resonant, empathetic detail. They’re both wanderers without a calling: Maggie is far too learned for her job, while Bernard dropped law school to pursue a career with the meretricious hope of travel, “you can never just be in a place, you’ve always got to pay attention”. When their dynamic is at its strongest, we have a pair of urbane yet rudderless souls, and whether they will finally elope depends on the audience’s careful viewing of this detailed, erudite romantic drama.

Around the Sun is on VoD on Tuesday, August 4th.

Where’d you go Bernadette

Posted on by victorfraga

Marketed as a “mysterious comedy-drama”, Richard Linklater’s 20th features a short- and dark-haired hairy version of Cate Blanchett, starring as an architect long past her prime time who finds a very peculiar way of spicing up her life and her career, thereby challenging a mid-life crisis. It is based on the eponymous runaway bestseller by American novelist Maria Semple.

In the second trailer 0f Where’d You Go Bernadette (you can see the first one here, launched last December), we see our protagonist Bernadette Fox (Blanchett), a doting mother and wife, increasingly frustrated at her petty problems, particularly a feud with a woman living next door. When the situation spirals out of control and the neighbourly relationship collapses (alongside with the wall between the two houses), Bernadette simply “disappears”. We soon learn that she taken up a new career challenge… in Antarctica!

This looks like a major step away from director’s previous endeavour, the sombre and meditative Last Flag Flying (2017), while still dealing with confusion and turmoil in the average American family. Cathartic fun for the bored and embittered middle-aged American professional, who has created a loving family and encountered enough financial stability, and yet remains keen to “break free”, however unorthodox the solution might be!

Where’d You Go Bernadette is out in cinemas across the UK in the second half of 2019. The exact release date is yet to be confirmed.

Last Flag Flying

Posted on by victorfraga

American identity is intimately associated with military belligerence. The country thinks, eats and breathes its wars. The establishment thrives in perpetuating military conflicts, even when it has to lie and engage in completely unnecessary action merely for political gain (as Spielberg investigates in The Post, also in cinemas right now). And the average American – particularly males – more than often see their lives inextricably connected to bloodshed and tragedy.

The three males in Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying all bear scars of the Vietnam War, where they served together. Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) suffered brain damaged, and has experienced a life on benefits, while Mueller (Laurence Fishburne) has a bad leg. The third man Larry “Doc” Shepherd (a deliciously avuncular Steve Carell, pictured below) bears psychological scars: he ended up in jail for two years for a BCD (which stands for a “bad conduct discharge”, or, as he prefers to call it, “best career decision”). The movie takes place in December 2003, nine months after the illegal occupation of Iraq began.

Larry turns up at Sal’s private and pretty run-down watering hole. They soon fetch Mueller as the three men embark on a road trip in order to attend the funeral of Larry’s son, a young Marine killed in Iraq. They go to Arlington National Cemetery, only to find out that the body is in a difference location in Delaware. And so their funereal quest goes on.

This is a superbly acted film with a multi-threaded script meandering gently through issues of race, religion (Mueller is black, and also a preacher), ageing, failed masculinity and the consequences of war for American soldiers and their families. The depth of the dialogue and the performances is remarkably profound. There is a conversation on a train, as the three man take the coffin back to Larry’s home in New Hampshire, that’s particularly moving. You too will brood and laugh over the conversation as the three men reflect about the meaning of war and reminisce about their sexual adventures in Vietnam three decades earlier.

The first 110 minutes of this two-hour film come across as very anti-war. Larry questions the conflict, the lies about weapons of mass destruction and he even refuses to give his son a military burial, instead taking the body back home in order to bury him in his school attire (instead of the military uniform). But then Linklater finds a very strange and unexpected closure to his film, perhaps a change of heart. The unflinching duty to serve the country is the message lurking in the background throughout the entire film, and I got the impression that the filmmaker was going to kill this possibility in the end. But instead the message comes full circle. It’s precisely in having served the country that these men find redemption. And their son, too.

This is a film that attempts to be anti-war, but ultimately slips into jingoism. The director proposes patriotism as the solution to war, but this is a fallacy. Patriotism is the very root of war, and so it can’t be used as a remedy. This proposition is like the “hair of the dog”: a misleading solution that ends up perpetuating the problem (in fact, the canine expression is used by Sal in reference to his own alcoholic predicament). “The last flag flying” is not synonymous with “the last man standing”. A flag is no substitute for a human being.

Last Flag Flying is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 26th.