Hit Man’s Ending Isn’t As Sunny As It Seems

Photo: Netflix

This country’s national mythology would have us believe that few things are more American than pie. Never mind that pie wasn’t actually invented in America — the fact that we stole it from various other cultures and called it our own only makes it more American. Pie is grandma’s house. Pie is a roadside diner. Pie is that scene from Stand by Me where Lard-Ass gets revenge on his tormentors by sparking a chain reaction of projectile-vomiting at his town’s annual pie-eating contest. This humble dessert’s stature in the Americana canon is an idea that Richard Linklater’s new rom-com-noir–philosophy dissertation, Hit Man, toys with in its final moments.

As Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) says at various points throughout the film, “All pie is good pie.” It’s a dubious statement, perhaps, and one that’s arguably more true of pizza. As with much of Hit Man, though, the line is taken from real life: In the Texas Monthly article the film is adapted from, journalist Skip Hollandsworth writes that the real Gary Johnson — a community-college professor who moonlighted as a fake hit man to help cops catch would-be killers — developed a code with one of his clients to identify himself at their Denny’s rendezvous. “That looks like good pie,” the client would say, to which Johnson would reply, “All pie is good pie.” It’s an exchange right out of a bad movie, and both the article and Linklater’s film point out the extent to which Hollywood has shaped our cultural conception of hit men. Within the context of the movie, however, the line also underscores a recurring theme in Linklater’s filmography — the idea that an unaddressed darkness lurks around every corner in America, often hiding just beneath a folksy veneer of southern etiquette and a slice of warm pie.

The pie line makes its final appearance at the very end of the film, when Gary and Madison (Adria Arjona) sit down for what looks to be an extremely early dinner, based on the obscene amount of sunshine streaming through the windows of their fancy new house. After falling in love and lust under false pretenses, the duo has finally managed to put the past behind them and reinvent themselves as a happy all-American family, complete with a couple dogs, a couple kids, and an apple pie on the dinner table. As an upbeat, soft-rock-adjacent score plays, one of the kids asks how Mommy and Daddy met, and Gary and Madison respond with some cutesy banter that ends with the pie line, calling back to their first encounter. While the movie constantly ping-pongs between different tones and genres, this last scene cranks the artificiality up to sitcom levels, to the point where its sincerity starts to feel insincere. This is the happy ending — the scene that confirms all of Gary’s philosophical lectures about living dangerously and whether or not people can reinvent themselves. It arrives, though, shortly after Gary and Madison kill an asshole cop to cover up Madison’s other murder. The tonal whiplash between that noirish comeuppance and the film’s sunlit coda seems to say that people can change, sure, but only by getting worse. If a second act is possible in American life, you might have to asphyxiate someone with a plastic bag for it.

This being Linklater, that bleakness comes with a more forgiving, optimistic flip side, which keeps the movie from ever tilting into proper noir territory. During the courtroom scenes, when the dummies who tried to hire Gary to kill someone stand trial, the film shows a wide array of outcomes — including spouses who choose to forgive their partners for attempting to have them killed or defendants who feel that Gary entrapped them by egging them on during their lowest moment. Some might be beyond redemption — including the “future school shooter” who tries to have his mom killed — but for the most part, the film argues that people deserve a second chance. That idea echoes Linklater’s other Hollandsworth adaptation, 2011’s Bernie, in which a friendly mortician, pushed to his limits, murders a miserly old woman who’s abusive toward him, then proceeds to spread her wealth around town, improving everyone’s lives. Even good people, Linklater’s work contends, are capable of compartmentalizing horrible deeds. (The director is friends with the still-imprisoned Bernie Tiede in real life and is working with him to sue the state of Texas to install air-conditioning in state prisons.)

The best of Linklater’s recent films, the HBO documentary Hometown Prison, pushes that tension between American violence and the importance of forgiveness to its extremes. Set in his hometown of Huntsville, Texas, the doc shows how the town orbits around a prison where the state’s executions are carried out, exploring the rippling effects of that violence and the ongoing efforts to end the death penalty. Despite the subject matter, the film somehow retains the shaggy hangout quality of the Linklater oeuvre, doubling as a journey through his childhood and a portrait of how the prison impacts people he knew growing up, from classmates who served time there to a bolo-tie-wearing civil-rights lawyer who happens to be an ex-boyfriend of his mom’s. Regardless of what they’ve done — from inmates in Huntsville to the people who tried to hire Gary Johnson to kill someone — Linklater’s films argue that they’re all part of the same tapestry, as American as apple pie.