Category: Signature Roles
Actor: Tommy Lee Jones
Role: Thomas Boyette
Director: Andrew Davis
A soldier, a prisoner, and a conspiracy
The Package, directed by Andrew Davis and released in 1989, is a taut, intelligent Cold War thriller that feels like a bridge between the political paranoia films of the 1970s and the action films of the 1990s. Gene Hackman plays Sergeant Johnny Gallagher, a career Army man assigned to escort a prisoner, Thomas Boyette, from West Berlin back to the United States to face a court-martial. Tommy Lee Jones plays Boyette, or rather, he plays the man Gallagher believes to be Boyette, and the film’s central twist is that the prisoner is not who he seems. Without giving too much away, it is enough to say that Jones’s character is at the centre of a conspiracy involving rogue elements in both the American and Soviet militaries who want to sabotage a nuclear disarmament treaty. Gallagher must unravel that conspiracy while trying to stay alive, and Jones, as his adversary and mirror image, gives a performance of great cunning and menace.
Davis, who would go on to direct The Fugitive, in which Jones would win his Oscar, directs The Package with a documentarian’s attention to military procedure and to real locations in Berlin and Chicago. The film feels authentic in a way that many thrillers do not, and Jones’s performance is a large part of that authenticity. He plays Boyette as a soldier, not as a movie villain. He moves like a soldier, he talks like a soldier, and he thinks like a soldier, which is to say, strategically, patiently, and without sentimentality. When he escapes from Gallagher’s custody, it does not feel like a plot contrivance. It feels like the inevitable result of underestimating a professional, and Jones makes that professionalism terrifying.
Two soldiers, two Americas
The heart of The Package is the relationship between Gallagher and Boyette, two men who have served the same Army and who now represent two different Americas: one that believes in duty and in the possibility of peace, and one that believes peace is a betrayal. Hackman and Jones, two of the finest actors of their generation, play that opposition with great subtlety. They are not hero and villain in a simple sense. They are two professionals who respect each other’s competence even as they try to destroy each other. Jones, in particular, gives Boyette a weary intelligence that makes him more than a plot device. He believes in what he is doing, however terrible it is, and that belief makes him dangerous in a way that a purely evil character never could be.
Jones and Hackman had a natural chemistry, built on mutual respect and on a shared, laconic style. They do not waste words on each other, and they do not need to. A look, a pause, a decision made in silence can carry a whole scene. Davis, who understands actors, gives them room to work, and the film benefits enormously. The Berlin scenes, shot on location in a city still divided by the Wall, have a documentary immediacy that grounds the conspiracy plot in real history. The film was released in the very year the Wall fell, which gives its story about hardliners trying to prevent peace a particular poignancy. Jones’s Boyette is, in that sense, a man of a dying era, fighting to preserve a Cold War that is already ending, and Jones plays that desperation with great skill.
Action with intelligence
The Package is also an action film, with chases through Chicago, shootouts, and a climactic confrontation at a military ceremony, but Davis never lets the action overwhelm the story. Every set piece grows out of character and out of the conspiracy, and Jones’s Boyette is at the centre of the best of them. When he moves through a crowd, or prepares an ambush, or negotiates with his co-conspirators, Jones conveys a mind working several steps ahead. It is the same quality he would bring to Samuel Gerard, but inverted: Gerard uses his intelligence to catch a fugitive, Boyette uses his to evade capture and to carry out a plot. That inversion is fascinating, and it shows Jones’s range. He can play the hunter and the hunted with equal conviction, and he can make both feel completely real.
The film was a modest commercial success, but it has grown in reputation as a smart, well-made thriller, and as a preview of the Hackman-Jones-Davis collaboration that would reach its peak in The Fugitive. It also closes Jones’s 1980s filmography on a high note. Across the decade, he had played husbands, fathers, drifters, thieves, villains, and soldiers, and The Package brings many of those threads together in a single, complex character. Boyette is tough, intelligent, loyal to a cause, and willing to kill for it. He is, in other words, a Tommy Lee Jones character in full, and Jones plays him with the authority and the ambiguity that have always defined his best work.
Why Boyette endures
Boyette endures as a signature Jones role because he shows Jones at the height of his powers as a screen antagonist. He is not a villain who twirls his moustache. He is a soldier who has made a terrible choice, and who will see it through to the end. That moral seriousness, that refusal to play evil as caricature, is what makes the performance memorable. It also makes the film’s political message more powerful. The Package is not just about a conspiracy. It is about what happens when loyalty to an institution becomes loyalty to a faction, and when duty is used to justify murder. Jones embodies that theme without ever preaching it, simply by playing a man who believes, completely, in what he is doing.
Watch The Package for the Hackman-Jones scenes, for the Berlin locations, and for the way Jones makes a conspiracy thriller feel like a character study. Notice how he listens, how he waits, how he makes Boyette’s intelligence visible in his eyes. It is a performance of great control, and it is a fitting close to a decade in which Tommy Lee Jones established himself as one of the most reliable and most interesting actors in American film. From Coal Miner’s Daughter to The Package, he had proven that he could play anything, and that he would play it truthfully. The 1990s would bring him the fame he had long deserved, but the foundation was laid here, in the 1970s and 1980s, in roles like Boyette, where he did the work, quietly, and let the work speak for itself.