Cory's Reads #37: Who Is Our Hit Man?
Powell and Plemons play the part(s)
Who is your hit man?
The question is posed early on in Richard Linklater’s new film Hit Man, yet another slam-dunk from the indie auteur. Like most Linklater projects, Hit Man is a jolly good time, with a dash of profundity for good measure. Silly, sexy, and suspenseful all at once, Hit Man is a genuine crowd-pleaser, featuring terrific lead performances from two of the most attractive stars in Hollywood right now: Glen Powell and Adria Arjona.
Arjona’s career is clearly on the rise, with another star-making turn coming later this year in Zoë Kravitz’ directorial debut Blink Twice. I imagine her name will reappear in future editions of this newsletter. But for now, we need to talk about Glen Powell.
The Austin native co-wrote Hit Man alongside Linklater, making it their fourth collaboration together. Powell previously appeared in Linklater’s hilarious Everybody Wants Some!!, as well as the criminally underseen Netflix film Apollo 10 1/2. Powell also appears briefly in Linklater’s Fast Food Nation. The pair of Texans have proven to be a formidable duo, but then again…Powell’s presence has proven to be complementary to just about every film he has lent it to. Even with those lesser-known Linklater credits (Powell had a bit role in Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over even earlier in his career, as well as an appearance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises in 2012), Powell’s mainstream success began with Top Gun: Maverick in 2022. One year later, Anyone But You cemented his status as a box office draw, and with Twisters now on the horizon, Powell’s star continues to ascend.
What makes his work in Hit Man so damn fun is the range of characters he inhabits. The film follows Gary, a mild-mannered philosophy professor who also works undercover with the New Orleans Police Department. When he discovers he has a knack for portraying fake hitmen as a part of the department’s sting operations, he embraces the role wholeheartedly, developing unique characters for each and every unwitting client. Gary’s research process allows him to cultivate the perfect hit man for each of them, matching what the felon-to-be might envision when they hear the term “hit man.”
In turn, Powell cleverly acknowledges just about every expectation we as an audience might have for a hit man. Russian accents, New England accents, and Patrick Bateman impressions abound as Powell plays with these different personas. There is a meta-thrill to watching Gary “act” as these different characters, knowing that we are watching Glen Powell perform the performance, so to speak.
Cory's Reads #36: I Saw the Sun Glow
Remember the solar eclipse? It feels like ages ago, I know. It was last month, a fun albeit fleeting blip on the radar of 2024. Unequipped with the proper eyewear, I did not actually see the phenomenon. I watched the livestream, texted friends and family both locally and around the country. It was t…
Gary eventually settles into a long-term role as Ron, the hit man persona he develops for Adria Arjona’s Madison, a gorgeous housewife who plans to have her abusive husband assassinated. As Gary pores through Madison’s Facebook page, he leans back and asks that essential question…
Who. Is. Your. Hit Man?
Essential to Hit Man is the space between its two words. A “hitman” may be the term popularized by video games and film, but a “hit man” is just one kind of man, able to be molded and changed. Nevertheless, the introduction of Ron seems less like a careful response to the needs of the case, and more like an opportunity for Gary to reinvent himself in the most desirable of terms. Ron is perfect. He wears a leather jacket, loves puppies, and won’t hesitate to engage a group of kids in a game of pickup football. As a proud four-eyes, I resent Gary’s shedding of his glasses as part of his transformation into handsome Ron, but I digress.
This idea of reinventing one’s identity is central to Hit Man. Gary is even teaching his students about this very topic. Can we change who we are? Do we even know who we are to begin with? Is it really as simple as adopting a new self and acting out those traits until they become second nature? There may be something far-fetched about Gary effortlessly unleashing Ron unto the world, but it may also be true that Ron has sat dormant within Gary for years, waiting to be introduced to the world. After all, is identity determined by one’s self, or by those around us? Gary’s coworkers in the police department (the hilarious one-two punch of Retta and Sanjay Rao) know him to be nerdy and uninteresting. That kind of reputation is hard to overcome without the confidence of a Ron.
"I would get black-out drunk with Ron,” quips Retta’s Claudette after Gary’s first foray into the character.
“Gary is hung like a straw,” say Rao’s Phil. “But Ron? Strictly nightstick.”
What neither Claudette nor Phil knows is that Ron is here to stay, as he and Madison enter into a steamy, secretive relationship. As elements of Ron continue to merge with the man formerly known as Gary, even his philosophy students wonder when their professor got so hot.
Of course, those of us watching the film may wonder how Glen Powell’s appeal was ever in doubt. Hit Man is about its own star’s identity just as much as it is about any other. While it may be Gary trying on those different identities, it is Glen Powell flexing his talent and charm, hopelessly evident in even Gary’s most mundane moments. Powell’s presence could threaten to undermine the film’s necessary suspension of disbelief, but it instead lends the film an extratextual component. Despite Hit Man’s lack of a theatrical footprint, the film reads as an unofficial audition for movie stardom.
From Hangman to Hit Man to straight-up “The Man,” Powell’s brand of celebrity evokes the movie stars of yesteryear. There may never be another Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, but Powell’s pretty-boy charm would have been right at home in the late 90s and early aughts. It still finds plenty traction in today’s box office landscape, but its sharp contrast with the brooding boyishness of Timothée Chalamet or Austin Butler is evident. Powell is more chameleonic than his contemporaries, although his performances do not quite dissolve into his characters. Hit Man may have demonstrated the 35-year-old’s range, but it did so by entering into conversation with the ‘Glen Powell’ persona. The best movie stars — not to be confused with the best actors — inject additional meaning into their films by offering their own reputation as the cherry on top of the cinematic sundae.
The latest such sundae from Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos came with a few extra toppings this past month, offering three different short stories for the price of one. Powell is therefore not the only actor of late to try a few different characters on for size, as Jesse Plemons was even awarded Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his work as Robert, Daniel, and Andrew in Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness. Plemons’ rise through Hollywood’s ranks has been much more visible than Powell’s, first breaking out in 2006 as Landry Clarke on Friday Night Lights and again in 2012 as Todd Alquist on the final season of Breaking Bad. With a strangely stilted speech pattern and a physical appearance somewhere between handsome movie star and meth addict, Plemons has garnered attention from several of Hollywood’s most high-profile filmmakers. He appeared alongside the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (an actor to whom he bears a strong resemblance) in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, and quickly landed roles in films from Steven Spielberg, Adam McKay, Charlie Kaufman, Jane Campion, and Martin Scorsese.
It is almost surprising that Kinds of Kindness marks Plemons’ first collaboration with Lanthimos, whose embrace of the awkward always seemed a natural fit for Plemons’ unnatural demeanor. Even acting alongside Emma Stone, who just won an Oscar for her performance in Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Plemons delivers the greatest performance(s) I have ever seen in a Lanthimos film. He somehow manages to find more energy in Lanthimos’ deadpan dialogue than anyone ever has before, his dry delivery so appropriate for the filmmaker’s prickly provocations.
Like Lanthimos, Plemons is adept at alienation. It is often funny — as in this scene from the criminally underrated Game Night — but it is just as easily horrific, like in Judas and the Black Messiah. Plemons’ unsettling onscreen persona may prohibit him from becoming a golden boy a la Glen Powell, but he may still be commanding more respect on and offscreen than any other actor in Hollywood right now.
By taking on similarly multiplicative roles, Plemons and Powell manage to tackle identity from opposite ends with their recent films. But whereas Hit Man encourages us to go searching for the powerful identities lying dormant within us — to redefine ourselves on our own terms — Kinds of Kindness confronts us with the notion that we may not be anybody at all. Across its three tales, Kinds of Kindness introduces characters hopelessly stripped of their identity’s most basic signifiers. What if our decisions are not truly our own? What if our loved ones are not who they say they are? What if, deep down, we prefer it that way?
The film is humorous and soul-sucking like any great Lanthimos project, and its leading man is up to the task. Already one half of a Hollywood power couple — Plemons and his wife Kirsten Dunst both received Oscar nominations for 2021’s The Power of the Dog — the Dallas native is not quite auditioning via Kinds of Kindness for any heightened status within Hollywood’s ranks, but he is showcasing his deservedness nonetheless.
Like Powell, Plemons is uniquely positioned to explore the shallows and depths of human identity, largely by presenting three identities to us that almost must be unique to him. If Glen Powell is a throwback to the kind of unattainably cool movie star whose identity is ours to admire from a distance, Jesse Plemons offers a similarly distancing form of nostalgia for that rare movie star whose strength lies not in their charm, but in their icy exterior. Whereas many modern movie stars may invite us to project ourselves onto their likeness, these gentlemen strike too much fascination and fear in us to allow for such identification. Earlier this year, I could not help but feel that there was a Timothée-Chalamet-sized hole at the center of Dune: Part Two, his celebrity image defined by a kind of youthful simplicity. Perhaps his legibility is appropriate for a film concerned with such a messianic figure in Paul Atreides, but there is a glaring lack of complexity in most of Chalamet’s performances that disappoints me as we look towards this next era of superstardom.
So who is Hollywood’s hit man? Do we need a singular face — or set of faces — that dominates our popular culture? Or is there something uniquely democratic about this new age of celebrity, in which a litany of actors and actresses can lay claim to cultural supremacy? In fairness, there seems to be less competition among Hollywood’s leading ladies. Chalamet’s Dune co-star Zendaya likely locked up the power position with her work in Challengers earlier this year, with only the aforementioned Emma Stone breathing down her neck. I suspect we appreciate the wider options afforded to us by today’s celebrity landscape, not to mention the blank canvases so many celebrities sell us as part of their brand. But have we gone searching for the specificity of stars like Powell and Plemons elsewhere? Is that how we end up with cults of personality around men who don’t actually have that much personality? Is that how we end up putting reality-stars-turned-convicts in the White House? Is this a leap in logic testing the patience of anyone who has stuck with this newsletter until the end?
I don’t have the answers. I prefer asking questions. And so I ask you once more…
Who is your hit man?
Once again skipping this month’s Letterboxd review. Because we are halfway through the year, however, I wanted to share my top ten films of 2024 thus far. It has been a good-not-great year in film, but the following films are absolutely worth seeing:
Challengers
I Saw The TV Glow
Hit Man
The First Omen
Kinds of Kindness
Problemista
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
How to Have Sex
Dune: Part Two
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Thanks for reading! Read my reviews of these films and more on Letterboxd at @creid61, and keep up with the rest of my work on Instagram at @coryreid6125.
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