The late Gene Hackman gave one of his last great performances in Under Suspicion, an underrated thriller now on Prime Video in the UK.
The sad passing of the great Gene Hackman last month prompted an outpouring of tributes on social media – and much discussion about his best work. Was it The French Connection, in which he played the morally dubious yet ferociously driven New York Cop, Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle? Or was it his quieter but no less committed turn as the saxophone-playing surveillance expert Harry Caul in The Conversation?
They’re certainly in contention, and his performances in Mississippi Burning, Hoosiers, The Royal Tenenbaums and Unforgiven shouldn’t be overlooked, either. Oh, and he also happened to play arguably the best incarnation of Lex Luthor the big screen has yet seen in 1978’s Superman (and two of its sequels).
Streaming platforms – at least in the UK – also have a number of less prominent Hackman movies to choose from; Prime Video, for example, is currently recommending Nicolas Roeg’s little-seen 1983 drama Eureka, the 2003 John Grisham adaptation Runaway Jury, and the 1988 Vietnam war drama Bat*21.
All are worth seeing. But another film we’d add to the ‘underappreciated Hackman’ list is Under Suspicion, a psychological thriller originally released in 2000 without making much of a dent at the box office. It isn’t a classic like The French Connection or The Conversation, but it’s an example of how Hackman could lift a film with the strength of his acting, and how unafraid he was of exploring the uglier side of human nature in his work.
Admittedly, things don’t look too promising at the outset. Essentially a remake of a French film, Garde à Vue, itself adapted from a novel, Under Suspicion is rather oddly directed by Stephen Hopkins – a filmmaker better known for such genre fare as A Nightmare On Elm Street 5 (1989), Predator 2 (1990) or the big-screen Lost In Space remake from 1990.
Hopkins opens his thriller in fidgety style – it’s all Tony Scott-esque jerky cuts and dissolves, while a panning aerial shot looks uncannily like something from Mission: Impossible 2. It’s perhaps an attempt to add a bit of scale and early-2000s trendiness to what is for the large part a one-room thriller.
That edit-heavy opening scene settles us into the thriller’s location: the idyllic yet economically divided San Juan, Puerto Rico. Among the island’s richest men is Henry Hearst, a tax lawyer who lives in a sprawling house with his much younger – and conspicuously more attractive – wife, Chantal (Monica Belluci).
As he’s about to give a speech at an upscale fundraising event, Henry’s politely ushered into the large yet somehow stifling office belonging to Captain Benezet (Morgan Freeman). Two teenage girls were recently murdered in the area; Henry uncovered the body of one victim while out on a morning jog, but certain details in his statement don’t add up.
Benezet and Henry have something of a history together, and his line of questioning is in deliberate contrast to his cockier, physically aggressive colleague, Detective Owens (Thomas Jane), who’s more than happy to play Bad Cop.
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Acting from beneath a conspicuously terrible wig and exuding glib charm, Hackman almost looks as though he’s coasting through the role of a generic rich guy in the film’s opening scenes. As screenwriters Tom Provost and W Peter Illiff deepen the mystery, though, Hackman only becomes more magnetic and fascinating to watch. What at first might have looked like a ‘take the money and run’ gig proves to be something much more disturbing, as Benezet digs ever deeper into Henry’s seemingly respectable persona.
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As a piece of thriller filmmaking, it’s firmly in three-star territory. Despite some tricksy bits of staging which see Benezet emerge in Henry’s flashbacks to probe at his recollections in real time, Under Suspicion lacks the precision of a thriller by, say, David Fincher (we can only imagine what the same film might have looked like had Fincher made it instead).
In terms of acting, however, Under Suspicion is much harder to fault. Freeman and Hackman (who previously appeared together in Unforgiven) are both Oscar-winning acting veterans, but it’s notable how generous they are with each other. Rather than compete to see who can dominate the screen with the ‘biggest’ performance, they instead act with restraint; for the first act, their characters circle each other, giving off the pretence of mutual respect while at the same time throwing out subtle barbs and insinuations.
Freeman and Hackman are capable of communicating an emotion with a subtle tilt of the head and a sideways glance, and to Hopkins’ credit, he and cinematographer Peter Levy realise that it’s often better to keep the camera steady, the shots long and allow the actors to carry the movie.
It all builds to a similarly restrained climax, in which Henry’s onion has been “peeled down to the nub” as he puts it, and the production design itself has been whitteld right down to nothing more than a bright light and a pristine white wall.
Freeman and Hackman share a final scene together, and the former generously hangs back while the latter gives us an impeccably-delivered monologue filled with the self-justification of someone who, deep down, knows he’s a deeply troubled individual. Hackman excels in a role that, frankly, most Hollywood actors would have turned down flat.
“At one point, I went through a period that, if we’d had the money to do it, I’d have been frightened to do it,” Hackman told the BBC about his performance in 2000. “In terms of bearing one’s soul, that’s the kind of part that actors beg to do. That’s what attracted me to do it. It really digs into you soul.”
Under Suspicion was one of Hackman’s latest performances before his retirement in 2004. It’s proof that, although his career had a few three-star movies in it, he only ever gave five-star performances.
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