Why Gene Hackman Really Was The GOAT
The Immovable Object - Why Hackman's Nineties Renaissance Was So Special
While there was never a decade after his arrival where Hackman wasn't a fixture, the eighties were slightly less fruitful for the actor - at least to begin with. Even though there were critical successes, such as Roger Spottiswoode's Under Fire, many films failed to register as strongly at the box office. They weren't fallow years per se, and some films, like the controversial Eureka, went on to be reappraised in the vein of Night Moves as highlights of Hackman's career, but there was less momentum compared to his breakout in the preceding decade.
That missing sure-footedness soon evaporated, with the latter half of the eighties seeing Hackman lead successes like the sports drama Hoosiers, the Kevin Costner-led thriller No Way Out, and the divisive but still Oscar-nominated Civil Rights drama Mississippi Burning. Hackman's role in the latter-most film, an Alan Parker-directed effort which cast him alongside a young Willem Dafoe, earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, priming him for an iconic career resurgence in the years to come.
Despite its historical shortcomings as they pertain to the whitewashing of the FBI's role during the African American Freedom Struggle, the filmic qualities of Mississippi Burning are not in doubt, with Hackman's performance as a southern Bureau agent a joyous reminder of his formidable screen presence. Indeed, as the nineties would show, Hackman would only grow more forceful and gigantic, somehow taking up more of the frame even when vacating space as a supporting player.
It might be over-generalising to call this Hackman's "villain era", but it's a role he played frequently and well during the decade. Tony Scott's Crimson Tide, Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead, Sydney Pollack's The Firm - all cast Hackman in an antagonistic capacity, but these were far from cut-and-dry performances. Hackman proved adept at finding the tragic humanity of these often conflicted villains, The Firm's Avery Tolar possibly the most heartbreaking of the bunch.
But undoubtedly the most fascinating film of Hackman's that decade is Unforgiven, the Clint Eastwood-directed Anti-Western that earned Hackman his second Oscar win, in which he took on the role of the tyrannical Sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett. Viewed in isolation as a strong character performance that complements the morose throughline of Eastwood's masterpiece, it's suitably impressive, but placed in the context of Hackman's early career, it takes on an altogether different kind of significance.
Eastwood's film is predicated around legacy - specifically his own. While its place in the genre canon is often exaggerated - as if it was the first Western to challenge Old West mythology - it is singular in its discussions around legacy and career. It is Eastwood's movie, and in it, he takes a long, hard look at his filmic self and the violence that personality is inextricably linked to. It's a sort of melancholic penance in that way - a vulnerable declaration of an old man looking back at his past, and not necessarily liking all that he's seen.
But this also extends to Hackman, because Unforgiven doesn't just serve as a commentary on Eastwood's career - it also works as a thematic rejoinder to its antagonist's breakout film: Bonnie and Clyde. If Bonnie and Clyde is pure myth - a film imbued with a rebellious spirit that exemplified the boundary-pushing nature of the New Hollywood - then Unforgiven is anti-myth, reaching back through the past of not just its own genre, but to an era of cinema more broadly. The inversion is made complete by Hackman's Little Bill, a cold-hearted pragmatist who has become an agent of the new world - someone who has more in common with the character of Frank Hamer than a free spirit like Buck Barrow. It's a small wrinkle, but one that amplifies the already sombre currents of a mournful Old-West ballad.
Unforgiven could have been the perfect bookend to Hackman's career, but it ended up heralding a brilliant twilight, rubber-stamped with one of the millennium's most seminal outings.
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