From philosophy professor to (fake) hitman, in “Hit Man”, the new film by Richard Linklater

The American director’s first film Richard Linklater It has a great title: You can’t learn plumbing by reading a book. Knowledge in cinema Linklater It is decisive, because language is and conversation is inherent to the staging of all the films he has made. Speaking is an act that exceeds communication. There is no other way to corroborate the thoughts of others than to pay attention to the word spoken. Without words there is no thought. That initial title of his career, however, indicates a dilemma: experience is not only acquired by reading.

In Hit Man. Accomplices to deception, The pragmatic question lies in knowing whether a university philosophy and psychology professor can imagine and eventually behave like a hitman. In the prologue, Gary Johnson is presented as a loner who is comfortable with his academic work and his domestic life accompanied by two cats (Jungians) and birds that he meticulously feeds during the mornings.

Thanks to his electronics skills, he works overtime working as a sound recording technician in police raids aimed at arresting people who request the services of hitmen. An unexpected situation forces him to go from recording the conversation that will serve as evidence for the arrest to presenting himself to the client as someone capable of killing for money. Surprise for everyone: Gary is a very good interpreter of the killer. He is a man of readings, a professional of the word; From there arises the versatility of his imagination when it comes to composing murderers. From then on, he goes to the “crime scene.”

After the opening in which Gary inaccurately quotes Nietzsche and plays with one of his many ideas prone to trivialization (“living dangerously”), The tone of the film is evidently light, but not insubstantial. The succession of characters who decide to hire the (false) murderer are deliberate stereotypes with which a comic dimension infiltrates the story while a philosophical concern about the nature of identity is gently displayed.

Can someone essentially change who they think they are? Didn’t the aforementioned Nietzsche say that the best thing for a wise man was to shed his skin like snakes? Gary’s change of role is just a narrative turn that evidences a form of philosophical inquiry present in almost all of the director’s films. Is a person the same at 20, 30 and 40 years old? What relationship exists between the child one was and the adult one becomes? The first question corresponds to the trilogy of Before sunrise, Before sunset and Before nightfall; the second could not be other than Boyhood.

Accomplices to deception It also aims to dismantle the myth that hired killers exist. Linklater He suggests through his character that this job, if not non-existent, is at least improbable. He maintains, in the film and in some interviews, that it is a popular fantasy, and adds that cinema has helped delineate that figure. The inclusion of a quick clip with heterogeneous films of the genre, and not only American ones, works as a laconic test. Maybe so, maybe not, but this foray into crime introduces the police genre to the story, just as what happens between Gary and a young married woman who wants to end her husband’s life qualifies the plot with elements typical of the remarriage comedies characteristic of the classic era of American cinema.

The most beautiful thing about Accomplices to deception lies in observing the immediate chemistry between Gary and Madison, which can be compared to that of Jessie and Céline when they first randomly cross paths on a train bound for Vienna. It’s a problematic crush: she believes he is Ron, the killer, not Gary, the college professor. How long can a lie be sustained? The script takes advantage of that starting point. There are several narrative turns, perhaps predictable, whose greatest cunning lies not in the drift of events but in the ambiguous attributes of the identity of those involved.

TO Linklater has been interested in exploring on repeated occasions the lives of ordinary people who are participants in extraordinary situations. In Bernie took the case of Bernie Tiede, deputy director of a funeral home, a citizen loved by the entire community who killed his wife and after doing so was able to convince his neighbors and acquaintances for a long time that his wife was still living with him. An ominous theme like the one described was tinged with comedy, an operation similar to the one put into operation in Accomplices to deception, whose inspiration is also a true story.

Illegality and the suspension of morality silently fascinate the filmmaker, as can also be seen in one of his best films, The Newton Ganganother story based on a true story. However, the four brothers who robbed banks in the first half of the last century did not shoot anyone and only tried to steal the money from the guardians of other people’s money and not the savings of their clients.

None of Linklater’s films neglect the word. For Linklater, action comes from speech.. In that sense, Accomplices to deception It may be the staging of the imagination of some of the characters in Waking up to life, a great film in which the conversation is constant while a character who flies over the world of the living strives to distinguish between waking consciousness and dream consciousness. That, on this occasion, it is a real case is not an impediment to developing the pop speculative philosophy that can be ascribed to Linklater and that depends on the language.

What is at stake here is what is stated in an initial dialogue between Gary’s ex-wife and him, regarding the real possibility of change that a man or a woman has throughout a life. The springs of personality are what is studied here. Linklater, leaning slightly towards the indeterminacy of the self. Instead of the discovery of the true self, he prefers the invention of it. By the way: there are no sequence shots to follow the characters’ conversation. The conventional shot and reverse shot is the grammar chosen for the dialogues, always witty and suggestive, whose duration is strange compared to the conventions of American cinema.

It would be unfair to omit the notable work of Glen Powell as Gary, who co-wrote the script with Linklater, and whose interpretation is not distinctive for the number of personalities with which it invests the murderers, but for the gradual intersection of temperaments between Gary and Ron. The amalgam between his “true” self and one of his occasional characters is verified in his assertiveness. It is this attribute that can be verified empirically, when the fictional self that he embodies begins to engulf Gary’s self. For more than a century this way of conceiving the subject has been circulating in the mouths of those who have the job of thinking. A fashion? A trend? The contingency of the self is the figure that emerges in this comedy of the beloved son of Austin, Texas.