For those who missed Richard Linklater’s last movie, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, despite how well-received it was by critics, Hit Man is a welcome reintroduction to the writer-director. And yes, Linklater has been flirting with the mainstream of late, albeit with his own brand of “kook” thrown in. Case in point, 2019’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, an adaptation from the novel of the same name. Hit Man, too, is from specific source material. In this case, an article by Skip Hollandsworth called “The Hit Man Who Works for the Cops,” which appeared in a 2001 issue of Texas Monthly. Considering Linklater’s ties to the Lone Star State, it wouldn’t be a surprise if he had filed away this article for years before finally coming back to it (especially since it took place in Linklater’s native Houston). And, although it is said that the craziest shit tends to happen in Florida, Texas is practically neck and neck for that title. The story of Gary Johnson (played by Glen Powell, who also co-wrote the script) is just such an example.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a movie “based on a true story” if some of the facts weren’t stretched ever so slightly beyond recognition. This extends, for a start, to changing the setting of the narrative from Houston to New Orleans. Hence, opening the film with Jelly Roll Morton’s “New Orleans Bump” (and yes, there was a Jelly Roll before the current one that has weirdly captured the heart of America). But one thing that remains undeniably the same is the “mild-mannered” nature of Gary. His appearance, his personality, the very essence of his aura. And yet, this is exactly why Linklater commences the movie with a teaching scene (always requisite in any movie about a teacher) centered on Friedrich Nietzsche. At first, the message from Nietzsche that Gary wants to impart to his students is a “seize the day” one (believe it or not, Nietzsche wasn’t all nihilistic aphorisms), quoting the line, “…the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously!”
Alas, “Mr. Johnson’s” urging to carpe diem (à la John Keating or Cher Horowitz) is met with nothing but eye rolls and snarky comments, including, “Says the guy driving the Civic.” Ah, no insult as timeless (in postmodernism) as the shade thrown at Hondas. The point being that no one, least of all his students, would ever deign to take life advice from somebody as banal as Gary. To emphasize that banality right afterward, Linklater shows the audience Gary in his natural habitat, sitting alone in a pristine apartment with two cats named Ego and Id (the two cats, named as such in real life, are mentioned in the article, too). It’s all part and parcel of his decidedly “vanilla” lifestyle. One that he seems destined to shirk when an opportunity arises to take the place of an undercover cop named Jasper (Austin Amelio), who has been placed on a mandatory leave of absence after what he deems to be a result of “cancel culture” bullshit (a.k.a. beating up some teenagers on video).
Caught in a bind, Claudette (the always glorious Retta) and Phil (Sanjay Rao), Jasper’s fellow officers, call on Gary, who already happens to be in the van, to fill the role at the last minute. Accustomed to merely handling the “tech side” of the audio recordings, Gary is expectedly apprehensive, but, like everyone else, he’s quickly surprised to find how much of a natural he is at “being” a hit man. Or at least pretending to be. At the same time, it’s not that shocking at all, considering he spends his life studying the classic texts of psychology (Jung, Nietzsche, etc.)—studies and philosophies meant to give some insight into the human mind. None of which say anything all that favorable. Indeed, Gary finds his worldview about humanity shockingly confirmed via these encounters with the so-called dregs of society. Many of which, contrary to stereotypes, also happen to be middle- and upper-class folk. Take, for example, “Society Lady” (Jo-Ann Robinson). Based on one of Johnson’s highest profile “clients,” Lynn Kilroy (an ironic last name, needless to say), she, too, is a rich woman who wants to stay rich by killing her husband instead of getting divorced. She also tries to make a move on Gary while she’s at it.
But even someone as “well-to-do” as her isn’t immune to the long arm of the law. For, just the same as police can arrest people if they catch someone in the act of soliciting sex, the same goes for being caught in the act of soliciting murder. Even if the lawyers defending the “criminals” insist what Gary is doing constitutes entrapment. Fortunately for Gary and the NOPD, many juries don’t agree based on what they hear in the voices on the recordings: bona fide murderous venom.
The question on everyone’s mind in the film and in real life, though, is: “How, I wanted to know, does the cat-loving, garden-tending Johnson manage to convince people that he is their one best hope for a better life?” Gary’s take in the article? “‘What I’m really there to do is assist people in their communication skills. That’s all my job is—to help people open up, to get them to say what they really want, to reveal to me their deepest desires.” Or, as Madonna put it, “A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That’s why they don’t get what they want.” Then again, they don’t get what they want when they say it out loud to Gary either.
The candor we hear in Gary’s voice in the article translates easily to Powell’s voiceovers in the film. For example, Gary musing to the audience, “People feel almost disappointed to learn that hitmen don’t really exist. This idea that there are people out there at a retail level you can just hire to eliminate your worst relationship issues, or facilitate some money scheme, or the usual combination of both. It’s a total pop culture fantasy. But because hitmen have been a staple of books, movies and TV for the last fifty years, good luck getting anyone to believe their existence is all a myth.”
In the article version of that voiceover, Hollandsworth and Johnson acknowledge that, yes, technically there are hitmen (usually only for the mafia), but they’re not as pervasive or “well-studied” as the masses have been led to believe. He writes, “Although the professional hit man is a staple of detective fiction, no one is really certain if there is someone in this country who makes a living as a hired gun. Organized crime families and drug syndicates have employees who will do whatever their bosses tell them to do, which often includes firing machine guns at certain rivals or burying them in cement. And there are the occasional wannabe mercenaries who take out ads in the backs of military magazines claiming that they will do anything asked of them. But they almost always turn out to be frauds. If there are highly qualified triggermen making their talents available to ordinary citizens, says Johnson, ‘then they don’t advertise very well. They certainly aren’t advertising in Houston. I’ve never heard of such a person.’”
Certain other painstaking details from the Hollandsworth article are incorporated into the film as well. Including a book of Gandhi’s philosophies situated on Johnson’s nightstand. This little flourish is extrapolated from Hollandsworth’s description, “He reads Shakespeare, psychiatrist Carl Jung and Gandhi. He even keeps a book of Gandhi’s quotations on his coffee table. One of his favorites is ‘Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.’”
In addition, Linklater is committed to playing up the comicality of Johnson’s acting brilliance. How no one ever saw this guy coming precisely because of the talent he had never unlocked out in the open. As Hollandsworth says, “Although plenty of cops have pretended to be hit men in undercover murder-for-hire investigations, Johnson is the Laurence Olivier of the field. In law enforcement circles, he is considered to be one of the greatest actors of his generation, so talented that he can perform on any stage and with any kind of script. If he is meeting a client who lives in one of Houston’s more exclusive neighborhoods, he can put on the polished demeanor of a sleek, skilled assassin who will not sniff at a job for less than six figures. If he is meeting a client who lives in a working-class neighborhood, he can come across like a wily country boy, willing to whack anyone at any time for whatever money he can get.” In short, “everything to everyone.”
But Linklater veers the film into other thematic territory, too—mainly the question of whether committing murder (or not) is a matter of “morality” (usually a social construct) or survival. Simply helping humanity “be the best it can be” (God knows Hitler and other “racial purgers” throughout the centuries have tried to use that defense). Gary, in one of the final lessons to his students, has half of the class decide on a murderer’s punishment based on a modern judicial system and the other half based on “caveman law.” Or lack thereof. Telling one group of students they’re simply a nomadic community living in Paleolithic times, he paints the picture that their leader is “unhinged” and poses an “existential threat.” So what do they—what can they—do? Without a modern judicial system in place, the answer is effectively: whatever they want. Including kill. This giving rise to a larger reminder that the creeds humanity lives by are all tenuously in place so as to prevent people from tapping into their “long-dormant” “savagery.” But, as most know, human savagery is hardly dormant at all in the present, even in spite of the innumerable restrictive and oppressive laws currently in place.
In Hollandsworth’s article, the underlying theme is actually something that’s more in keeping with an average Linklater movie: the moral decay of a population conditioned to believe in the so-called “values” hammered into their heads (specifically, those heads that are living in the United States). That is to say, instant gratification extends to any and everything. Hence, Hollandsworth quoting Johnson’s assessment, “…they have developed such a frustration with their place in the world that they think they have no other option but to eliminate whoever is causing their frustration. They are all looking for the quick fix, which has become the American way. Today people can pay to get their televisions fixed and their garbage picked up, so why can’t they pay me, a hit man, to fix their lives?”
The message Linklater wishes to impart, however, is less about American sociopathy and more about the very essence of “identity” itself. Or rather, if there is truly such a thing at all, or if we only delude ourselves into thinking there is. For no one can claim they have a sole identity. It’s entirely dependent on whatever situation or point in their life they’re in. As Angela Chase phrased it in My So-Called Life, “What I, like, dread is when people who know you in completely different ways end up in the same area. And you have to develop this, like, combination ‘you’ on the spot.” And that’s what Gary comes to realize/grapple with as he starts to embody all these different personalities, merely conforming to the person he believes these would-be clients “need” him to project.
As for Madison Figueroa Masters (Adria Arjona), Gary’s ramped-up love interest in the movie version of events, she’s a composite loosely based on an unnamed woman in the article and Kathy Scott, who wanted to hire “Mike Caine” to kill her husband of four months. As Hollandsworth states of Scott’s motives, “She felt she deserved better. It is also possible that she felt she deserved the $50,000 insurance policy, $47,000 in retirement benefits and two houses worth an estimated $175,000 that would go to her if her husband died.” Kathy, unlike Madison, isn’t spared the ramifications of being so honest and open with her “hit man.” While Movie Gary decided to dissuade Madison from saying explicitly that she wanted her husband dead merely because of their “sexual chemistry,” described as “instant” in the source material, Real Gary can’t be emotionally budged. Instead, “Mike” got the solicitation out of her and she was sentenced to eighty years in prison. So here’s the part where Linklater saw the opportunity for a “zany” rom-com where there otherwise wasn’t. Especially when Hollandsworth added another “romance option” at the end of the article: “[Gary] learned that [the potential client] really was the victim of abuse, regularly battered by her boyfriend, too terrified to leave him because of her fear of what he might do if he found her. Instead of setting up a sting to catch the woman and send her off to jail, he decided to help her. He referred her to social service agencies and a therapist to make sure she got proper help so she could leave her boyfriend and get into a women’s shelter.” And thus, two different women gave birth to the character of Madison.
Unluckily (or luckily, depending on one’s level of misanthropy) for the real Gary, he seemed to remain a lone wolf through it all. But Movie Gary gets the Hollywood treatment (even though Linklater tends to constantly rail against “those kinds” of films). Ergo, the presaging dialogue between him and his ex-wife, Alicia (Molly Bernard), when he insists, “I’ve accepted the idea a normal relationship isn’t in my cards.” Alicia balks, “No. What is normal? I mean, look at this way, everyone is at least a little fucked up. You just need to find someone who is a little fucked up in a way that you like. Or at least, I don’t know, in a way that complements your own fucked upness.” And so the stage is set for Madison to enter the picture, complete with her dog-loving personality designed to “complement” Gary’s cat-loving one. The only problem is, he’s not convinced she would fall for “Gary,” since he’s been presenting as “Ron.” Ergo, a classic, Shakespearean storytelling device of deliberately mistaken identity. Which means, inevitably, a big blow-up of conflict will ensue. The question is, will Madison’s reaction result in Gary’s assessment of what all these “solicitations for capital murder” are about: “A lot of it is seeing how love has just curdled into hate…and murder is just the best way out.”
But Gary’s love for Madison refuses to curdle, even when shit really hits the fan and her ex (you know, the one she wanted to have killed) reenters the picture. This, coupled with the various identities he’s tasked with keeping from certain people (mainly his coworkers) and parading to others (mainly Madison), leads to the assured-in-its-fraughtness denouement.
A finale that is much different from what Hollandsworth presents in “The Hit Man Who Works for the Cops.” Wherein we understand that Gary’s hyper-independent nature is cemented by “the long-range psychological effect on a person who continues to do something that gives him, as Johnson himself puts it, ‘a rather depressing outlook on the human condition.’” Hollandsworth continues, “One day I ask Johnson if he thinks his hit man job has anything to do with the fact that he doesn’t have long-term relationships. ‘Doing what you do,’ I say, ‘it’s sort of hard to trust people, isn’t it?’ He pauses. ‘I think it would be fair to say that I don’t let many people get too close,’ he tells me in a masterpiece of understatement.”
Linklater, astonishing viewers with his sentimental rom-com side (as opposed to the more depressing/cerebral one we’re accustomed to seeing in the Before series), decides that there is a version of Gary—an alter ego, as it were—that might allow at least one person to get close to him romantically. Apart from that major personality detail, Linklater remains largely faithful to the article, including some of the most minor specifics. For instance, the “secret code” Johnson devises in the movie is also taken from one of his real life encounters. In the movie, the “client” must ask, “How’s the pie?,” whereas in the article, the code is developed by a “client” who approaches Gary with the observation, “That looks like good pie.” In both versions, Gary’s reply is the same: “All pie is good pie.” A phrase that itself relates to a certain ability to be everything to everyone, to offer “something for everybody.”
To that point, Gary’s own cipher-like nature is perhaps what makes him so perfect for embodying an array of different “characters” (or “flavors,” to keep going with the pie metaphor). This foretold in one of his teaching scenes when he asks the class, “What if your ‘self’ is a construction? An illusion, an act, a role you’ve been playing every day since you can remember?” If that’s the case, then Gary is determined to jettison all previous ideas he had about his identity every time he walks into a restaurant (his preferred was Denny’s) to project a particular persona for a “client.”
In addition to the philosophical musings on identity and how it’s not as “fixed” or “real” as we think it is, Linklater also highlights the ersatz rules society has put in place to make people believe there is a genuine “barrier” that prevents humans from killing other humans. But, as Gary mentions during another session with his class (this time an outdoor one), “…killings actually play a larger part in our social evolution than previously thought. The impulse to weed out those destabilizing forces is likely a dark thread in our historical DNA. These killings were thought to have served a twofold purpose: they not only protected social coherence and norms, but also eliminated a certain kind of abusive and uncooperative person from the gene pool.” So there you have it, the ability to murder without some sort of societally made-up comeuppance is part of the reason why humanity isn’t ten times more fucked up.
It’s something that both Gary and Madison seem to understand, thus achieving what Gary’s ex-wife had wanted for him all along: finding someone whose fucked upness is the kind he likes and appreciates. As for the real Gary, before the credits roll, Linklater dedicates the movie to him (calling out his death at age seventy-five in 2022), followed by a series of pictures of the fake hit man in different “guises,” exhibiting different “identities,” if you will. Which one represents the “real” version of him? Well, that’s a query one could pose of themselves, too.
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