Joy Williams at Harper’s Magazine:
Gene Hackman was Popeye Doyle, the Reverend Scott, Lex Luthor, Royal Tenenbaum. He was Little Bill Daggett and John Herod. He was a senator and a president. He was Harry Caul and Harry Moseby and Max Millan and Norman Dale. He made sixty-six movies, sixty-seven if you count his uncredited voice of God in the forgettable Two of a Kind. (God had nothing meaningful to say.) He didn’t do death in most of them, but in the ones he did, his end was very awful. He dropped into a burning pit of fire in The Poseidon Adventure. His head was blown off by Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, and Sharon Stone terminated him in a gunfight with a shot to the eye in The Quick and the Dead. As president of the United States, he was stabbed in the heart with a letter opener by a septuagenarian cuckold. He was shredded by bullets in Bonnie and Clyde, and it doesn’t look good when he’s machine-gunned from a floatplane and collapses bleeding on a fishing boat at the end of Night Moves—the boat going round and round in circles on an empty sea.
Yet none of these Hollywood executions could hold a candle to the real thing, a departure so circumstantial, grotesque, and profoundly lonely that one could only think that Death had lost her marbles with this one.
more here.
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