Portland Press Herald: PMA Films celebrates the legacies of David Lynch, Gene Hackman
March 10, 2025
by Dennis Perkins
Originally posted in Portland Herald, read it here
It’s a cliché to note the passing of a celebrity with a social media post reading, “Oh, scr*w you, 2025.”
But I get it.
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.
Now, is it odd to feel the loss of people you didn’t know so acutely? Sure. But it’s 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.
The good film folk at PMA Films know it. They’ve programmed a weekend mini-festival of appreciation for both Hackman and Lynch this week. Wes Anderson’s 2001 masterpiece “The Royal Tenenbaums” is anchored by arguably Gene Hackman’s crowning performance, and certainly his last great one. (Hackman retired three years later after the dispiritingly lame Maine-set comedy “Welcome to Mooseport” — which was filmed in Ontario, so we’re innocent on that score.) And Lynch is represented by both his breakthrough arthouse horror “Eraserhead” (1977) and his 20-years-later mind-bending neo-noir “Lost Highway.”
For all the sincere tributes to such monumental American movie figures, this is the best and truest way to mourn—on the big screen.
“The Royal Tenenbaums” takes Hackman’s career-long genius at playing prickly everymen for a valedictory joy ride. (Seriously, there’s 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.
Reminiscing about the film, co-star Bill Murray (who played Paltrow’s much older husband) recalls the legendarily grumpy Hackman giving young director Anderson a tough time, while admitting—along with the rest of us—that seeing Gene Hackman be irritable and uncompromising made for unforgettable movies.
“The Royal Tenenbaums” is perhaps Wes Anderson’s 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.
And it doesn’t work without Hackman as its center, the elderly rapscallion’s 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.
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’s one, understated line. It’s majestic, and so is Gene Hackman. I’m tearing up just thinking about it.
As a capper to a legendary career, he couldn’t have asked for better. Even if he reportedly wanted to throw yet another director off a roof at the time.
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. “Eraserhead” was the young art student Lynch’s 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.
With longtime collaborator Jack Nance (the endearing Pete from Lynch’s legendary TV series “Twin Peaks”) as its hapless/repellent protagonist, “Eraserhead” 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.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have picked 1997’s “Lost Highway,” 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 “David Lynch.” 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.
Misfired David Lynch is still David Lynch after all, and if the film’s 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’ve ever seen.
That’s 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, “was”) one of the true, inscrutable giants. We shall not see his like again.
“The Royal Tenenbaums” screens at PMA Films at 2 p.m. Friday and noon Sunday. David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” plays at 6 p.m. Friday, while “Lost Highway” 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.
