A tribute to Gene Hackman in 'Enemy of the State'

The greatest performance in the greatest '90s blockbuster

Greetings from Read Max HQ! A quick extra newsletter this week occasioned by the death of one of my favorite actors, Gene Hackman. For this week’s (paywalled!) recommendation round-up I’ll try put together some of my favorite under-appreciated Hackman gems that are currently on streaming, or otherwise easily accessible, but I wanted to single out here a particular performance and movie I love (and one I expect most of you have seen.) Sadly Enemy of the State isn’t on any of the big streaming platforms in the U.S. right now, but I promise it’s worth renting.

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Gene Hackman, who was found dead this week in Santa Fe at the age of 95, doesn’t actually make an appearance until about an hour in to Enemy of the State, the 1998 surveillance thriller directed by Tony Scott. At that point in the movie, our beleaguered labor-lawyer hero, played by Will Smith, is trying to meet with Brill, a secretive surveillance expert he hopes can help untangle the sudden smear campaign that’s gotten him fired from his job and kicked out of his home. In a ferry-depot bathroom he’s approached by Gabriel Byrne--wonderfully cast as “guy who has enough gravitas to plausibly be the obviously important character Will Smith is looking for”--whom he follows to a taxicab, only to realize he’s being taken in by an imposter. After escaping, Smith calls his wife (the great Regina King) from a pay phone in a hotel lobby. As they talk, Hackman rounds a corner, leans up against a column, and makes eye contact: “Fuck you,” he mouths to Smith. You can see the chewing gum in his mouth.

It’s a two-second moment, played subtly, but it’s arresting. The gesture, the body language--the adolescent lean, the hard glower, even the gum--is pure Hackman. Over the course of five decades Hackman perfected a paradoxical marriage of cantankerousness and playfulness, a register of ornery insouciance that seemed to automatically give his characters a depth and unpredictability.

Hackman would’ve been 67 when the movie was filmed; he’s in thick glasses and a Supercuts crop, playing opposite the biggest movie star in the world in peak physical condition. But from this moment on, the movie belongs to him. Smith--compelled, like the audience, by Hackman’s undeniable presence--pursues him. Hackman draws a gun, forces him into an elevator, pours potato chips on him, drags him to the roof, and screams technical nonsense at him. Smith, both as character and actor, can barely keep up.

Enemy of the State is, for my money, the greatest of the ‘90s blockbusters, a status it owes to many people: Aaron Sorkin and Tony Gilroy, who took passes on the script and to whom I think we can attribute its punchiness and political consciousness; Tony Scott, particularly well-suited to this material; Smith, at the height of his star power; Jon Voight, at his most reptilian; and the beautiful lineup of Y2K Guys who act as Voight’s thick-necked, baby-faced army: Jack Black, Seth Green, Jamie Kennedy, Barry Pepper, Scott Caan, and Jake Busey among them.

But it’s Hackman who really draws the movie together. He’s a stubbornly odd presence in Enemy, a paunchy, grouchy senior citizen appearing abruptly as a co-lead in what is otherwise a machine-engineered summer crowdpleaser. According to the synergistic logic of blockbuster filmmaking, Seth Green or Jamie Kennedy should have been Will Smith’s wisecracking-hacker sidekick in cool yellow lenses, not this old codger limping through a train-yard chase and complaining about his blood pressure. But the movie correctly and presciently identifies the rising generation of tech prodigies not as anti-authoritarian heroes but as glib and amoral careerists, and instead locates its heroes and moral authorities in more realistic, if also less Hollywood places: Regina King’s annoyingly insistent ACLU-lawyer mom, shouting at the cable-news talking heads, and a curmudgeonly paranoiac luddite who loves cats and hates the N.S.A.

I doubt this dynamic would work well if Brill was played by an actor any less capable than Hackman, who’s able to communicate so well both the strength required for, and the personal cost of, Brill’s longtime paranoia. Enemy of the State is often read as a kind of distant sequel to Francis Ford Coppola’s great 1970s thriller The Conversation, in which Hackman plays a quiet surveillance expert named Harry Caul who becomes involved in what he believes is a murderous conspiracy. If Brill is Caul, he’s a Caul whose suspicion has congealed into monomania, and whose awkwardness and timidity have curdled into rage. But what makes Hackman’s Brill such a compelling performance is how close to the surface he holds the soft underbelly. Not many other people could locate so immediately and credibly the softness behind Brill’s crotchety glower, as in the scene embedded above, when he steps into the elevator holding Smith hostage at gunpoint, only to crack a smile when two hotel guests join them (as Matt Zoller Seitz wrote yesterday, Hackman’s smile was his greatest weapon as an actor). You have to love a movie where the comic relief is evil and unfunny old crank is proven right--and maybe a little funny, to boot.