Hit Man is the ultimate makeover movie
Glen Powell dons many guises in this delightful screwball thriller, which revels in how Hollywood has shaped our desires, our fantasies, and our belief in reinvention.
My mother did not subscribe to fashion magazines. She did not have to, because she had movies.
Movies taught my mother (I’m guessing) — and by extension me (definitely) —everything about style, but mostly about self-presentation. I was a skinny, shy kid with a monstrous overbite and thick, unevenly cut hair. A dork. And yet … the movies my mom showed me made me believe I could turn into a swan with just a few tweaks and a kind of willed self-confidence. All I had to do was trade my shapeless woolen jumpers for form-fitting couture (a la Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face), chop my mane into a chic pixie cut (Audrey, again, in Sabrina or Roman Holiday), tweeze my bushy eyebrows into pencil-thin arches (Bette Davis, in Now, Voyager), and take some elocution lessons (all the Eliza Doolittles in the approximately bazillion versions of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady that have been produced ).
Later, after I had shed some of my adolescent awkwardness, I jumped headlong into reinventing myself, from the outside in. I fashioned my look and persona(e) off of the women I fell in love with on screen. I cut my hair like Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors. I swanned about in kooky hats like Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (and adapted some of her manic energy screwball energy when flirting). I bought a (faux) fur-collared suede coat like the one Kate Hudson wore with such swagger in Almost Famous. I started pronouncing “aunt” like auuuunt, not like the insect
I marveled at my ability to convince others that I was something other than a weirdo ugly duckling. And then I kind of started convincing myself of it, too.
Hit Man — the latest film from indie auteur Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, Boyhood, Dazed & Confused) — is all about this particular kind of movie magic: how cinema has shaped our identities and appearances, our dreams and desires, our expectations and behaviors. It’s part noir, part romantic comedy, part meta makeover movie. And it’s wonderful!
Gary (played by the absurdly handsome Glen Powell) is a dorky philosophy professor who moonlights as a hitman. Well, a fake hitman. Hitmen, Gary schools us in a clever voiceover montage, only exist on the silver screen. But the idea that one can hire a guy to get rid of an unfaithful lover, rich family member, or inconvenient spouse is just too attractive, too easy, too tantalizing. We want to believe it, so we do.
And so Gary is an undercover sting operative who poses as an assassin to catch people trying to hire him to commit murder.
Gary has a kind of easy, absent-minded bonhomie. He wears wire-rimmed glasses and short-sleeved button-downs tucked into belted denim shorts. He never asked for this life: A tech nerd, he initially started helping the police department operate their surveillance equipment. But he proves a scarily convincing killer. Plus, as a philosopher, he confides to us in a voiceover, the job gives him a fascinating glimpse into human psychology.
In order to seduce his marks, to make them believe that he’s really capable of murder, Gary adapts different personae and disguises tailored to their particular fantasies. He fashions wigs, stains his teeth, dons all matter of costume. Nearly all his avatars take their inspiration from the movies: Christian Bale’s pinstriped-suited serial-killer yuppie in American Psycho, Tommy Wiseau’s black-clad doomed romantic in The Room, a trigger-happy redneck that’s like an unholy mashup of Matthew McConaughey in The Beach Bum and James Franco in Spring Breakers, a really creepy Tilda Swinton knock-off. When he meets Maddy (Adria Arjona), a beautiful, scared young woman who tries to hire him to off her abusive husband, Gary adapts the persona of Ron, a sexy, laid-back hunk with an unbuttoned shirt, a gold chain, and aviator sunglasses — a guy who looks, actually, a lot like … Glen Powell. It’s not just her fantasy; it’s Gary’s too, taken straight from the scene in Bringing Up Baby, when Katharine Hepburn looks at Cary Grant’s frazzled paleontologist without his chunky frames and sighs, “You are so good-looking without your glasses.”
Anyway, she falls in love. He falls in love. Things get really hot, and messy. Fact and fiction blur. Gary wonders, can he actually become Ron, or maybe a bit more like him? Can he really reinvent himself?
Hit Man works so well because, like Gary/Ron, it gives us what we want, seduces us, indulges us, makes us believe in the fantasy it so deliciously serves up. That we can fall in love at first sight. That we can get away with murder. That we can change. That we can turn into Glen Powell or Aria Arjona. It lets us have our cake and eat it too. And isn’t that what the movies are all about?
Love this! But it's Cary Grant, not Carey.
Cannot wait to see this. I am SUCH a fan of Glen Powell!