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Is there anyone else who's the perfect fusion of character acting and star quality like Gene Hackman? He is the only actor in a Wes Anderson movie that managed to get away without sounding inert or cartoonish in some way. As much as I love Paltrow in RT or Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore, you must admit there's a kind of monotonous, 2D quality to their characters that, while appropriate for the Andersonverse, would be totally unsuited to ours. Gene Hackman walks a fine line between these two worlds, endowing Royal with all the trademarks of a Wes Anderson movie (social incompetency and eccentricity), yet making him an all-too-familiar person to the audience. And that's Gene Hackman's genius. He wears the shoes of his characters' impeccably, so that he belongs to the movie. He plays each of them like he's been playing them all his life, so that he belongs to us.
And Hackman in "Scarecrow", my god. For all the tenderness, anger, and shifty discomfort he brings to the role, he manages to make Depp's Scissorhands and Ledger's Ennis Del Mark look like wild overacting. And yet you never fail to recognize this man's soul right away. My god, what a fine actor.
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