With more than two dozen films to his credit and three decades of experience, Richard Linklater had never approached the criminal world as his generational colleagues such as Steven Soderbergh or Quentin Tarantino usually do.
The Texan filmmaker approaches that universe of thriller in Accomplices to deceptionreleased this week in theaters, although the approach is far from predictable.
Faithful to his restlessly sensitive path that has produced films such as Before sunset, Boyhood either Rock star, Linklater manages to create a character on the borders of fiction and reality in the figure of Gary Johnson (Glenn Powell), a calm and lonely philosophy professor who starts a part-time job working as an undercover police officer.
Bringing Nietzsche’s invective of “living dangerously” to reality, Johnson must pose as a hitman to extract a confession of attempted murder from his clients, whom he records with a hidden microphone.
The ambiguity of cinema within cinema is already glimpsed from the beginning, when the protagonist tries on costumes, makeup and various accessories to play his tough bully.
There is even an ironic nod to masculinity in the way the celibate academic comes to represent an illegal male in a few seconds with the alacrity of a magician or a superhero.
In any case, Johnson’s emotional situation and his risky profession soon come into check when on one of the dates orchestrated by the Police he meets Madison Masters (Adria Arjona, Puerto Rican actress, daughter of Ricardo Arjona), who asks him to murder her violent husband.
Attracted to her, Johnson recommends that he not do it and think twice, betraying his code and opening an unexpected door towards romantic comedy and the entanglement of duplicate identities.
Accomplices to deception It is thus nourished by a light network of folds and ambivalences that allow it to play with several genres at the same time without losing the unique spirit of a tender and intelligent film.
It was the distant publication of a magazine article Texas Monthly in 2001 dedicated to the real Gary Johnson, which motivated Linklater to imagine the film, although the director at that time could not find a way around it and was also busy with projects such as Waking up to life and Tape.
The journalistic note, written by Skip Hollandsworth (who also motivated the story of Bernie, released by Linklater in 2011), told the story of this failed doctor in Psychology who had exchanged an academic career for that of an undercover agent.
In the city of Houston, where he worked (in the film the setting is New Orleans), the camouflaged Johnson made around 70 arrests, saving the lives of an equivalent number of people. His acting talent as a hitman was so efficient that they came to call him the “Laurence Olivier” of death-for-hire investigations.
Only in 2019 did Linklater return to Accomplices to deception driven by an idea that occurred to Powell, who is also the film’s co-writer, from a true event that had happened to Johnson (who would die without seeing his film, in 2022).
Indeed, the police officer had dissuaded a woman abused by her husband from having him killed, encouraging her to leave him and start her life again, and thus freed her from charges of attempted murder.
The twist that Powell and Linklater plotted was to make Johnson and the woman fall in love, and from there the story could continue its course as a film. The mix between fantasy heartthrob and everyman that Johnson embodied suited Powell like a glove, who has been earning a visible place in Hollywood with similar roles in Top Gun 2: Maverick and With everyone except younot counting his imminent participation in Tornadoessequel to the 1996 disaster film.
Despite this dizzying emergency, Powell has been around the movies for a while and his collaboration with Linklater is far from being new: the actor had already played a small role in fast food nation (2006) and a decade later he earned a central role in the charming Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), a film that made him famous.
Still, neither Powell’s growing fame nor Linklater’s prestige helped the commercial distribution of Accomplices by deceptionwhich after an auspicious presentation at the Venice Festival and a round of failed negotiations with studios had to be sold to Netflix for a limited theatrical release.
The movie audience reproached Linklater for the gesture, which had already premiered in 2022 on the platform streaming his autobiographical animation Apollo 10½: A space childhood.
An independent filmmaker since his birth, Linklater replied that he had no other option given the reluctance of the major studios and the special interest of Netflix.
“My attitude toward studies is ‘What do they want?’ You already saw the audience’s response to the film, but the truth is that the studios didn’t do it,” the director said in an interview with The Independentwho in notes with that and other media complained about the lucrative omnipresence of the algorithm and the flat state of things in general.
And he concluded: “This speaks a lot about the time and the lack of confidence that studios have in films for adults; They don’t even notice if the film is not a franchise or the continuation of something previous. I mean, I’m getting into original territory, something that scares studios. “You’re less likely to lose your executive job if you endorse a fourth sequel to something than if you take a chance on something that audiences may be craving.”
To see
Accomplices by deception. USA, 2023. Screenplay: Richard Linklater and Glen Powell. With: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona and Austin Amelio. Duration: 115 minutes. Rating: Suitable for ages 13 and up. In theaters.
