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It\u2019s a clich\u00e9 to note the passing of a celebrity with a social media post reading, \u201cOh, scr*w you, 2025.\u201d<\/p>\n
But I get it.<\/p>\n
Especially with the recent deaths of film giants Gene Hackman and David Lynch, two completely different movie world figures whose passing hit me with a rapid, one-two sock right to my breadbasket.<\/p>\n
Now, is it odd to feel the loss of people you didn\u2019t know so acutely? Sure. But it\u2019s not that weird. Our intense connection with movies forms an intimate and powerful connection with the storytellers and the actors who bring certain characters to life on the screen. When a movie touches us so deeply, we let a piece of it lock into our conception of the world, and the death of the people who made it wrenches that connection apart. Their loss is a wound.<\/p>\n
The good film folk at PMA Films know it. They\u2019ve programmed a weekend mini-festival of appreciation for both Hackman and Lynch this week. Wes Anderson\u2019s 2001 masterpiece \u201cThe Royal Tenenbaums\u201d is anchored by arguably Gene Hackman\u2019s crowning performance, and certainly his last great one. (Hackman retired three years later after the dispiritingly lame Maine-set comedy \u201cWelcome to Mooseport\u201d \u2014 which was filmed in Ontario, so we\u2019re innocent on that score.) And Lynch is represented by both his breakthrough arthouse horror \u201cEraserhead\u201d (1977) and his 20-years-later mind-bending neo-noir \u201cLost Highway.\u201d<\/p>\n
For all the sincere tributes to such monumental American movie figures, this is the best and truest way to mourn\u2014on the big screen.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Royal Tenenbaums\u201d takes Hackman\u2019s career-long genius at playing prickly everymen for a valedictory joy ride. (Seriously, there\u2019s a scene of his imperiously sketchy patriarch riding go-karts with his estranged grandsons that is pure joy.) Hackman plays Royal, the deeply flawed absent father of a brood of child geniuses (Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller, Gywneth Paltrow) whose early potential has soured into grown-up disappointment, while ex-wife Anjelica Huston resists his attempts to reconnect with a bemused but wary eye.<\/p>\n
Reminiscing about the film, co-star Bill Murray (who played Paltrow\u2019s much older husband) recalls the legendarily grumpy Hackman giving young director Anderson a tough time, while admitting\u2014along with the rest of us\u2014that seeing Gene Hackman be irritable and uncompromising made for unforgettable movies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Royal Tenenbaums\u201d is perhaps Wes Anderson\u2019s finest achievement, distilling his meticulous (some might say fussy) visual and storytelling motifs into a potently hilarious and ultimately wrenchingly beautiful portrait of a messy but fascinating group of weirdos, who all happen to be related.<\/p>\n
And it doesn\u2019t work without Hackman as its center, the elderly rapscallion\u2019s self-serving manipulation of his children and ex-wife a brilliantly tricky balancing act of unforgivable awfulness and grudging admiration. Nobody but Hackman could find that tone.<\/p>\n
A late scene where Hackman confronts understandably standoffish elder son Stiller after a sudden tragedy with a simple, strange kindness is all father-son conflict and love distilled in Hackman\u2019s one, understated line. It\u2019s majestic, and so is Gene Hackman. I\u2019m tearing up just thinking about it.<\/p>\n
As a capper to a legendary career, he couldn\u2019t have asked for better. Even if he reportedly wanted to throw yet another director off a roof at the time.<\/p>\n
As for David Lynch, the task of selecting just two of his works is like dipping a net into a nightmare and marveling at the horrors you pull out. \u201cEraserhead\u201d was the young art student Lynch\u2019s first feature, a starkly horrifying black and white dream of anxieties and obsessions coalesced around themes of sex, fatherhood, and existential dread of what unfathomable insanity human existence has in store next.<\/p>\n
With longtime collaborator Jack Nance (the endearing Pete from Lynch\u2019s legendary TV series \u201cTwin Peaks\u201d) as its hapless\/repellent protagonist, \u201cEraserhead\u201d is modern male as victim and perpetrator, all acted out according to an otherworldly logic only David Lynch truly understands. For the rest of us, we can only cling to our theater armrests and hang on for the ride.<\/p>\n
Honestly, I wouldn\u2019t have picked 1997\u2019s \u201cLost Highway,\u201d as the Bill Pullman-Patricia Arquette starring head-trip thriller is the one film where it feels to me like Lynch is straining to be \u201cDavid Lynch.\u201d Even so, the typically queasy and baffling tale of menace, violence, sex, and body-swapping (maybe?) amongst the lowest, grubbiest rungs of Hollywood is never less than dangerously intoxicating.<\/p>\n
Misfired David Lynch is still David Lynch after all, and if the film\u2019s series of often mesmerizing set pieces never quite comes together as soundly as his other works, those jagged pieces still find me occasionally forgetting to breathe. An early party scene involving Pullman confronted by a pasty-faced mystery man (Robert Blake) with an impossible phone call is as thrillingly terrifying as anything you\u2019ve ever seen.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s David Lynch for you. An uncompromising, obsessive, yet completely in-control artist whose cinematic nightmares represent the purest form of auteurist expression, Lynch is (damn it, \u201cwas\u201d) one of the true, inscrutable giants. We shall not see his like again.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Royal Tenenbaums\u201d screens at PMA Films at 2 p.m. Friday and noon Sunday. David Lynch\u2019s \u201cEraserhead\u201d plays at 6 p.m. Friday, while \u201cLost Highway\u201d screens at 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets for all are $10\/$7 for members and students. Come out and share some great movies with people feeling the same loss you are.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n