THE WASHINGTON POST: Gene Hackman was cinema’s greatest average schmo

Most people have a favourite Gene Hackman performance. I have two.

The actor, a chameleonic everyman with a movie star’s charisma, was found dead Wednesday, local time, with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, and their dog in their New Mexico home. (An investigation into their deaths is ongoing.)

Hackman was 95 and had stopped acting after playing a fictional former president in the 2004 satirical political film “Welcome to Mooseport.”

He had a long and well-deserved retirement, and by all accounts a happy one.

He also had the love and admiration of audiences who felt that one of their own had somehow clambered up there on the screen, with a face like a beer mug and an unassuming sense of his own self-worth.

When Hackman was a struggling actor in the 1950s and early 1960s, he was close friends with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall, none of them considered leading men at the time, and certainly not the stuff of which movie stars are made.

Yet the times they were a-changing, as someone sang then, and the old gods were falling out of fashion. Audiences, young audiences especially, craved faces and voices that looked like them, talked like them, had doubts and flaws like them.

Hoffman was the first of the new lumpen-stars to break through in The Graduate (1967), but Hackman was close behind, with an Oscar nomination for his supporting part as Clyde Barrow’s dim-witted brother Buck in the same year’s Bonnie and Clyde.

With 1971’s The French Connection, he became an above-the-title, best-actor-winning star. His role as the crass, rule-breaking New York police detective “Popeye” Doyle was as far from Hackman’s own gently fastidious personality as can be imagined - which makes the performance, brutal and convincing, that much more remarkable.

From then on, Gene Hackman was Mr. Reliable - no matter whether a particular movie was good (Night Moves, 1975) or bad (Lucky Lady, also 1975), his presence in it demanded your loyalty and the price of a ticket.

He worked hard and often, and if his portrayal of Lex Luthor in three Superman films was proof of a gift for comic villainy, Hackman’s 1992 Academy Award for best supporting actor as Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven was a reminder that his avuncular smile could serve as a mask for pure evil.

Of the many coulda-shoulda-woulda Hackman Oscar nominations that weren’t, I would direct you to a matched pair: The Conversation in 1974 and Hoosiers in 1986.

In neither film does he play a hero or a villain. In both he is an average schmo whose personal values and mettle are tested. In Hoosiers he wins, and in The Conversation he loses, but it’s the essence of the Hackman persona that “winning” and “losing” are false binaries, not adequate to the task of illuminating the lives we lead and the choices we are often forced to make. It’s a muddle. Few were better at shining a light into the muddle than this actor.

In The Conversation, the Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece that came between the first two Godfather movies, he plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert as withdrawn from human society as his last name implies.

He keeps his professional secrets to himself and his emotions far from his occasional girlfriend (a young Teri Garr), but the possibility that the young couple (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) he has been hired to eavesdrop on may be targeted for murder brings the snail out of his shell, still bruised from a death his inaction caused years before.

Things do not turn out as Harry hopes, and The Conversation broods with a pessimism and a paranoia that were very much of their era, White House tapes and all.

They seem increasingly relevant once more as truth gets lost amid official false narratives, and as the deals that affect us get done where the cameras and microphones can’t quite catch what’s being said.

How do you play an invisible man, a human smudge? Harry’s officious little moustache, his glasses and his headphones serve as walls to keep others at bay, but the actor does something more - he illustrates the impossibility of hiding from oneself in the glimmers of personality that this walking ghost can’t help but leak and in the conscience he pretends not to have.

The Conversation is a movie about the futility of trying to change the world for the better and also the necessity of it, if you ever want to have a soul. As I said, it’s a movie for our times.

Hoosiers, directed by David Anspaugh, is about trying to change a high school basketball team for the better and, in the process, its players, their families, a small town in Indiana and maybe everything else.

That this is not an easy task is embodied in the film’s lead character, Norman Dale, the team’s new coach and a man as normal as his name, which is to say he has fallen down more than once and knows that life is the business of standing up again and again, as many times as it takes.

To me, this is the role that captures the essence of Gene Hackman, as an actor and possibly a person: a shy kid from Danville, Illinois, with a bully of a father who abandoned his family one day when the young Gene was 13, waving goodbye as his son was playing in the street. (“It was so precise,” Hackman told Vanity Fair in 2013. “Maybe that’s why I became an actor. I doubt I would have become so sensitive to human behaviour if that hadn’t happened to me as a child - if I hadn’t realised how much one small gesture can mean.”)

There are stories of how he was one of the nicest movie stars you’ll ever meet, always willing to talk with fans and remembering the name of a key grip decades after they’d worked together on a film.

There are also stories of how irascible Hackman was on the set, how intractable with directors, how he was something of a prima donna.

You get all of that in Norman Dale - Hackman’s recognition of the man’s complexity and his forgiveness of it, too, in other people and in himself.

He seemed to know that the truth of “human behaviour,” as he called it, is that it’s never one thing, that there’s something mean and small in the kindest moments, and benevolence in the brutality, as uncomfortable and as honest as that sounds.

He explored those contradictions for 50 years and in 80 nearly movies.

And then he waved goodbye.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.

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