“Tell me about The Royal Tenenbaums.” Up to this point, Gene Hackman’s Inside the Actor’s Studio is smooth sailing, the actor undeterred by James Lipton’s ostentatious delivery—he even breaks down when talking about his father, who abandoned his family with a wave of the hand. Hackman was 13; he gets a big laugh out of the crowd when he gathers himself and says, “Hey, it’s only been 65 years!”
So Lipton gets a Hallmark moment out of Hackman, somehow. And then it’s “Tell me about The Royal Tenenbaums.” Hackman tenses up, the hint of a smile vanishing as he launches into a pro-forma promotional soundbite. They move on quickly, and it’s back to questions from the audience and schmoozing with Arthur Penn in the front row.
Hackman famously hated making The Royal Tenenbaums, one of the few movies that showed up in every single obituary of the actor last month. The others? The French Connection, Bonnie and Clyde, Hoosiers, Unforgiven, Superman—but Tenenbaums was the one constant, one last iconic character in a classic movie, one that followed a decade of victory laps and grand actor blockbusters and showcases. After Hackman won his second Oscar for Unforgiven in early-1993, he became the go-to older actor to pair with a rising star to see if the latter could hold their own. It’s a small club: Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Chris O’Donnell. O’Donnell didn’t become a superstar, but he’s doing alright in television, and 1996’s The Chamber is worth watching for Hackman’s spit-drenched spin on a Death Row racist preparing to be gassed.
But none of those movies rose above vehicles for Hackman. From the time he won his first Oscar in 1972 until his retirement in 2004, Hackman was an actor who could get a film made on his participation alone. He had remarkably good taste, rarely appearing in total duds—although it’s hard to tell, because he elevated everything that he participated in. Stephen Hopkins’ Under Suspicion, released in 2000 and the one film that Hackman is credited as an Executive Producer (alongside co-star Morgan Freeman, who must’ve done this movie as a favor to some less talented friend), is a nonstarter, ridiculous and out of touch from the jump. It wouldn’t endure, unlike the five movies Hackman released the following year: Heartbreakers, The Mexican, Heist, Behind Enemy Lines, and The Royal Tenenbaums.
In those five films, we have a fine cross-section of Hackman’s taste and career as a whole: broad comedy, trashy thriller, conventional auteur work, big war movie, and, finally, an unconventional auteur work, one filled with complicated camera movements, hundreds of sets and costume changes, “strange clothes that don’t fit me,” and a young writer/director struggling to make his third film in the face of the frustration of his lead actor, the legendary and indomitable… Gene Hackman.
Not a stretch that Hackman’s amazing in the role: he hated Hoosiers even more, taunting director David Anspaugh every day and trying to get a recently sober Dennis Hopper to join in: “Looks like a career killer, doesn’t it?” I’m sure once Hackman saw The Royal Tenenbaums, he couldn’t deny it, just like he couldn’t deny the far less significant Get Shorty in 1995. According to Barry Sonnenfeld, Hackman cornered him after the premiere and said, “The film is good. But I didn’t think you knew what the fuck you were doing. I could’ve been so much better.” Like David Lynch’s famous sunny disposition, Hackman’s moods were anything but a put-on, and with his passing, there’s also a sense of losing a certain kind of authenticity and reality that appears lost to the 20th century, namely: artists for whom their work is life or death.
To be fair, I don’t think Hackman’s old pals Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino are particularly great or even good—they’re the ones who make Strasberg and the Actor’s Studio look stupid. When they go, the coverage won’t be constant, and they won’t mark the end of an era. In the American imagination, Hackman was the one who replaced John Wayne, emerging in the early-1970s just as Wayne was on his way out. He was every man: killers, generals, soldiers, criminals, millionaires, detectives, amphetamine-addicted all-night grocery store owners. He became a superstar 20 years before I was born; he was still headlining movies by the time I could notice, his face and name plastered on the sides of buildings and buses all over Manhattan.
So Hackman hated The Royal Tenenbaums, the 2001 movie that would overshadow all the others he made that year, and quickly, well within his lifetime. What did he think of Anderson’s subsequent career? He was a key player in elevating one of the few cinema auteurs left in America. Did he see, for example, The Grand Budapest Hotel? I doubt it. What about David Mirkin’s Heartbreakers? Did he rate this bawdy farce, where he plays a rosy-cheeked chain-smoking tobacco baron falling for an easy con from doe-eyed Jennifer Love Hewitt and her mother partner-in-crime Sigourney Weaver? I don’t think he rated that movie, either. He probably did it and didn’t complain because the money was good, the food was good, the accommodations were nice, and they had time. Heartbreakers spent a decade in development, a project so old that Meg Ryan was considered for Hewitt’s role at one point. It didn’t bomb, either, although $57 million against $38 million can’t be much of a profit; did Hackman ever turn contrite and acknowledge, in public, that these films he hated making kept his star burnished?
During dialogue looping for Hoosiers, which Hackman nearly skipped out on, he allegedly asked director Anspaugh, “How the hell did you do that?” Like Sonnenfeld, he showed his “respect” in the most brute, underhanded manner possible, still maintaining his “alpha dog” status over the puny, indecisive director. This was the dynamic he’d act out on just about every set he could. This wouldn’t fly with Tony Scott, and he’d chide friend Arthur Penn, but he really got nasty with the directors that brought him his best films. Hackman went out with 2004’s Welcome to Mooseport, a limp James L. Brooks rip-off directed by Donald Petrie, and again, I can’t imagine he saw that movie and felt anything but regret—well, maybe relief, because he knew it was all over: a routine stress test at his doctor determined that any future film work would destroy his heart. He stopped without a thought, giving his last major interview to Larry King in the summer of 2004. Still no reappraisal of Tenenbaums.
What did he think of his last great performance? Was he turned around, or, like Pauline Kael, did he stare dead-eyed at the screen, unable to make any sense of Anderson’s pachinko doll world? As far as I know, the answer is not out there—not even in the crime novels he co-wrote with mystery writer Dan Linehan.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits