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Gene Hackman’s Absolute Power
An actor who barely changed his look but constantly transformed himself.
The Gene Hackman who played the self-sacrificing priest in The Poseidon Adventure was physically indistinguishable from the ex-athlete turned private eye in Night Moves; the inspirational coaches in Downhill Racer, Hoosiers,and The Replacements; the tyrannical submarine captain in Crimson Tide; the aforementioned Herod in The Quick and the Dead, who denies fathering the teenage son who wants to kill him in a gunfight; the straying husband and steelworker in the little-seen but engrossing marital drama Twice in a Lifetime,from 1985; and the pathetic producer in Get Shorty who recycles cool-guy lines spoken by the movie’s badass loan-shark hero with the same success rate as Harry Caul telling jokes. It’s inevitable and comically correct that Keeley would end up in Barbara Bush finery as he sneaks through the hero’s rainbow-coalition-coded Miami nightclub to escape reporters, but what puts the sight gag over the top is Hackman’s intricate portrayal of a man who is shocked to find himself open to previously unthinkable experiences. But he was also a handyman — the kind of reliable, all-purpose day player who could fix casting and storytelling problems by showing up and raise brief moments to iconic status (as in another Nichols comedy, Postcards From the Edge, in which he plays the most empathetic, measured, polite, loyal Hollywood blockbuster director in all of movie history, with such grace that he fools you into thinking such a man could exist).
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