Word: hackmans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nothing else, Robert Benton's film Twilight is an ode to a fading brand of screen legends. Paul Newman plays Harry Ross, an alcoholic former detective in Los Angeles dependent on his employers, retired actors Jack and Catherine Ames (Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon). Harry becomes involved in a murder investigation after Hackman sends him to deliver a package to a mysterious woman. The essential features of film noir are in place in Twilight, which dutifully follows nearly every single convention of the genre. The inconsistencies in the film could be forgivable if the film had any dramatic urgency. Fortunately...
...Neither did Bill -- at least none we know about. But these days it's all about tapes. And the patron flick of wiretappers has got to be The Conversation (1974). Gene Hackman has the Linda Tripp role, a surveillance pro who gets hired to uncover an affair. Eerily, he plays the sax. And Linda, this part's for you: when the dirt Hackman digs gets folks in trouble, he develops a severe conscience problem. Stay till the end -- it's a doozy. Watching a tortured Gene tear up a Virgin Mary is chilling...
...late middle age. So is Absolute Power, the movie that fleshes out this hunk of granite. Many of its leading actors were born before the Rushmore carvings were completed in 1941. Eastwood, directing himself as a cat burglar on his eighth or ninth life, is 66, as is Gene Hackman, who plays a sexually reckless U.S. President. E.G. Marshall, in the role of the President's adviser, is 86 and counting. The plot is a doomsday version of Bill Clinton's Paula Jones problem, but the theme is impending mortality--settling scores before time...
...film version, directed by James Foley (At Close Range), Gene Hackman plays Sam as a scrawny, withered rooster, with tobacco stains on his teeth and hatred of blacks and Jews in his heart. He has an alcoholic daughter (a skeletal Faye Dunaway) and a grandson, Adam (chipper Chris O'Donnell), determined to save Sam from state-sanctioned murder. This makes for high, disjointed drama--a shotgun marriage of Method theatrics and TV-movie heart tugging...
...hard to figure out, however, who the source of his troubles is. The minute Gene Hackman appears as world-class physician Lawrence Myrick, oozing menacing bonhomie, a quality this splendid actor has virtually patented, we have our suspicions. It's the extent and passion of the conspiracy he has mounted to protect his research that is surprising and scary. That air of earnest befuddlement Grant has deployed to such good comic effect in the past serves him--and us--very well in this very different context. He's willowy and vulnerable in a way we no longer expect to find...