The actor co-wrote the new dark comedy with director Richard Linklater. It got roaring laughs at its Venice premiere, but its breezy immorality may turn some audiences off.
has always been fascinated by language, particularly in the, where both lovers are chatty but Ethan Hawke, as Jesse, dominates conversation, exploiting his facility for sweet-talk to seduce Céline . The subsequent films in the trilogy course-correct that imbalance, with Delpy having more input in the screenplay: Céline starts to meet Jesse’s dreamy romanticism with a frank, no-nonsense irony.
plays Gary Johnson, a cop who moonlights as a pretend hitman in order to arrest people seeking the services of a contract killer. All he needs to do is extract a clear demand for a killing and money for the service, and the arrest can be made.
Terrified by this prospect, he nevertheless finds over the course of this meeting—which is brilliantly played for laughs by Linklater and Powell, the co-writers of this film—that he is natural at the job because of his gift for rhetoric. Indeed, in a way that calls to mind, this gentle, educated man soon finds that his alter ego for the purposes of the job, Ron, offers him an outlet for another side of his personality that had lain dormant—a more extroverted persona, assured and cool.
This occurs when Gary meets, and immediately falls for, a young woman called Madison , who wishes to enlist Ron’s services to kill her ex-husband. Finding himself drawn to her, Gary finds a way—while being supervised by his colleagues, over a sound system, to talk her out of making an official request for a hit on her husband, thus sparing her prison.
I’m not asking for a clear condemnation of this character and his methods, as if cinema had a duty to always shoot down “problematic” characters; clearly, this is a film played for enjoyment, and a large part of it is fantasy. But some of’s juice, its delight, may be compromised for some viewers by its queasy viewpoint, which puts a police officer front and center, and sees him gleefully entrapping people for what may only amount to thought crimes.
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