Gene Hackman was a fixture in American movies for close to 40 years, appearing in New Hollywood classics of the ‘60s and ‘70s, high-toned studio fare of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and enough junky popcorn pictures to widen his audience even further. (Well-compensated actors everywhere should appreciate his trailblazing efforts in the field of superhero-movie slumming.) That’s why his passing this week at the age of 95 (!) feels like such a loss, despite the fact that his notoriously inconsequential film film, Welcome to Mooseport, just celebrated its 21st birthday. (Its 20th last year was equally ignored.)
The more fitting farewell, of course, was his third-to-last film: The Royal Tenenbaums, released in December of 2001, capping off a year where Hackman was busy even by his own prolific standards, releasing five notably different films. A few years ago, Mitchell Beaupre smartly captured how these five pictures demonstrate Hackman’s seemingly boundless versatility in characterization and genre, and in the matter of my favorite Gene Hackman performance, my Gen-X/millennial needle tilts toward the millennial side when I choose that asshole Royal Tenenbaum (just kidding; he’s more of a son of a bitch). It’s all-time work in an all-time film. But in the unofficial farewell tour of Hackman’s final multi-movie year, there’s another title that helps wrap up his career just as satisfyingly, and it’s a simple one: Heist. What it’s about is, it’s about a heist.
But because it’s a David Mamet thriller, it’s also about deception, slight-of-hand magic applied to life-or-death scenarios, and its own tautologies: “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money!” Of the movies Mamet has directed, it feels, somehow, like the one that inhabits both a classic genre and its Mamet-ness most simultaneously. Hackman plays Joe, a professional thief on the verge of—yes—retirement, ensnared into—yes—one final job. (His fence, played by a pitch-perfect Danny DeVito, is withholding payment on his last big score unless he agrees to complete a last last big score.)
The customary Mamet twistiness gives Hackman a lot to play: He’s angry, when he’s backed into a job he doesn’t want to pull or chewing out an impulsive underling; playful, when he’s relaxing into his hoped-for retirement as a boat-builder, bantering with a possible customer; no-nonsense, in a variety of disguises as he preps for the big day; and, of course, cool (so cool that, per a colleague played by Mamet staple Ricky Jay, “when he goes to bed, sheep count him”). He’s getting older, too, something the other characters are aware of, and Joe’s aware of, too; it’s also a movie about meticulous retirement planning. For this tricky plan to work, the last job has to be the last job.
Heist wasn’t really the last job for Hackman; his own retirement was far less ceremonial. A few years later, he took a stress test, and a doctor suggested he might be better off not working as an actor, so he stopped. He painted and fished and wrote books instead. In Heist, his matter-of-factness cuts through the Mametisms, the repetitive rhythms and half-oblique allusions. That’s not to say he’s at odds with the material; rather, that he wears it well, his long history of genre programmers making the exercise feel less stagy at every step. His little chuckles, the way he adjusts his ballcap; you believe Joe can slip in and out of his little incognito roles like road worker or FAA guy. It’s a movie that requires exactly the kind of acting Hackman was known for: near-invisible, utterly believable.
Even in more casual scenarios, Joe has to fake it, as when he pretends to not think of himself as all that smart: “I tried to imagine a fella smarter than myself,” he says at one point. “Then I tried to think, what would he do?” In one particular way, Hackman’s assignment here is the same as it is in Wes Anderson’s movie: Make some notably stylized (and often hilarious) dialogue sound as if it’s being spoken by an actual human being. But then, that was sort of always Hackman’s mission, wasn’t it? That’s the kind of gig that doesn’t get a grand finale.
