Philip Seymour Hoffman, 1967 - 2014

Whether embodying a near shut-in, choking on loneliness, his body collapsing in on itself, or a master communicator and manipulator, drunk on his own Kool-Aid, given to sudden ecstatic gestures and charismatic dance, Philip Seymour Hoffman conveyed a sense of bearing heavy burden like few others could. He was imminently melancholic, weighty, the most corpulent yet full-bodied of actors. He rarely looked comfortable in his body, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t use it, often with tremendous nuance. He was Sisyphian. Which is to say that, no matter how elephantine the burden he carried, he felt it incumbent upon himself to keep going up that hill. He was never not doing something active and compelling, never resigned to playing mere attitude. I’m struck, now, by how often his characters’ burdens involved ingestible vice: bad food, alcohol, drugs. He played a gas-huffer, a heroin addict, Lester Bangs. He perspired need. He was an all-round gifted, hard-working actor, but at this especially he was extraordinary: desperation. I just wish that the way he died didn’t so closely mirror his work.

top: Boogie Nights

bottom: The Big Lebowski

You couldn’t possibly pay the slightest attention to interesting American movies in the past 15 years and not know him. The high forehead, vulnerable, pale, a seawall against which all manner of earthly pressures crashed. That voice, typically nasal, often sounding like he’d dragged it out of bed, the mattress sweaty and half-stripped, before bashing it on the night table on the way up. Those cupping paws that looked like they had to have the cigarettes pushed into them. The eyes—they seemed to change all the time, hard to soft, pinned to orb-like, sometimes sexy. I first saw Hoffman in Hard Eight (1996), Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut. He played an arrogant mullet trying to bend a craps table to his will through sheer bullying. By Boogie Nights (1997), Anderson’s follow-up, I was really paying attention. He was a chubby, anguished pubescent in a man’s body, under-dressed, not easy to cuddle, though he tried to kiss Dirk Diggler with so much closeted passion. A small but memorable role in The Big Lebowski (1998) found him more uptight, nervous and really funny. It made clear that there was no limiting his range; no matter the lack of movie star handsomeness he would break out from the character actor ghetto. In Happiness (1998), this burden I keep thinking about was already fully formed. He was so pathetic yet so watchable, savouring Todd Solondz’s writing, even when its comic despair felt a little cheap.

from top to bottom: The Savages, 

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, 

Synecdoche New York

As Hoffman’s boyishness fell away, which it did rapidly, he became a go-to guy for a certain anxious weariness, and his work increasingly seemed focused on finding truth in the grotesque, as though the only empathy worth earning was the sort that rose from weakness. In Capote (2005) he gave a precision performance that hinges on his insistence on giving equal attention to the titular character’s fascination with others and his ultimate ruthlessness. Capote won Hoffman the Best Actor Oscar, but that performance was easily bested only a couple of years later in, for example, The Savages (2007), as Laura Linney’s brother, or Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), as Ethan Hawke’s brother. We see him shoot heroin in that movie, and we see him die. He played the much-doubted priest in Doubt (2008), who you keep feeling for even when you’re almost sure he really is a pederast. He was the only one who could have starred in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York (2008), in which he’s attacked by his own sink, dates a woman in a burning house, and watches his adult daughter deteriorate before his eyes. He plays a nobody playwright who gets genius grant and decides to make a play about everything. Rehearsals go on for all his life. His character’s art becomes infinite, boundless, beyond the frame. Life itself. The film is unbearably sad, but I’ll be damned if Hoffman doesn’t make every scene feel relevant, forward-moving. It was his most Sisyphian role.

The Master

What I will admire most in this filmography is Hoffman’s mesmerizing, Wellesian convergence of hysteria and colossal confidence in Anderson’s The Master (2012), about a very American longing for self-made religion, and one of the great films of this young century. As L. Ron Hubbard stand-in Lancaster Dodd, Hoffman seemed older than ever, but that fatherliness made him eerily persuasive, repeating questions like a relentlessly applied balm to Joaquin Phoenix’s wounded Freddie, and later, in that strange and haunting final meeting between master and pupil, singing to Freddie about how he wants to get him alone on a slow boat to China. The Master also emphasized how much Hoffman could do with repressed anger, that scene where Dodd is so determined to shame a guy bold enough to confront him publicly by using only wit and a sense of wonder, yet he can’t help but suddenly spit out “Pig fuck!” The rage is always there, but he masks it with playfulness and ambition and that weird bonhomie.

I write all this to remember Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died of a heroin overdose last weekend at the appallingly young age of 46, leaving behind three kids, his partner, Mimi O’Donnell, and countless colleagues and friends. It is just so sad. He was a prolific actor who I’ve had the immense pleasure of spending much time watching, listening to, thinking about, writing about. I interviewed him only once. He could be prickly, and it wasn’t the easiest conversation, but it was rewarding. Our talk ended with the topic of death in Capote, and Hoffman’s last words stick in my mind now. “It’s like Capote has come to bear witness to all these 
deaths,” he said. “And the truth he discovers is that they don’t pass through him 
without leaving marks.” 

                  

Church and state of uncertainty

If, like me, you’ve never seen John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, you may want to avoid learning too much about Doubt, the new film version adapted and directed by Shanley himself. Set strictly within the confines of a Bronx Catholic School in 1964, it’s a dramatic meditation on the dichotomy of ambiguity and faith, or as two characters put it, proof and certainty. There’s pleasure to be had in watching the events unfold blind, learning the facts to be debated only as they arise, piece by carefully doled-out piece.

Having said that, many of you will catch on to where this is heading from the outset, in a scene where each of the central players are present and the conflict, in its way, is spelled right out for us. Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives a sermon on the theme of doubt and how it might bring us together rather than leave us in lonely despair. As Flynn gives examples of internal sources of unease, little things “no one knows” about us, Shanley cuts to individuals in the congregation, listening with rapt attention and recognition. It’s as though Flynn’s speaking directly to them, as though he’s somehow looked into their souls and diagnosed their unspoken suffering. But when Flynn offers his last example of secret turmoil—“No one knows I’ve done something wrong”—the camera rests firmly on Flynn himself. The moment is not exactly subtle, but it is elegant.

The evidence against Flynn, in a superbly amiable, layered performance from Hoffman, racks up swiftly. Flynn smiles a lot, and offers physical affection to his kids. He takes an unseemly amount of sugar in his tea, makes unseemly jokes with his fellow priests. He likes his nails kinda long. He keeps little flowers in his Bible. Most importantly, he singles out Donald Miller (Joseph Foster, perfect), the school’s only black student, and an alter boy, for special attention. He becomes, in the words of one character, Donald’s “protector.” When Sister James (Amy Adams) eventually sees something that suggests an “unhealthy” bond being forged between Flynn and Donald, she brings the issue to the attention of Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), the fearsome, ultra-stern school principal half-jokingly referred to by Flynn as a dragon. Very quietly and methodically, a campaign’s undertaken to get rid of Father Flynn, preferably following a full confession.

Much has been made about Shanley’s tip-toeing around the truth with regards to what unfolds behind closed doors in Doubt, but in all honestly I think the truth’s pretty damned clear, though more time with Donald, who’s conspicuously absent for much of the movie, might have shifted our reading of the scenario either way. The exact actions Flynn is guilty of are not so important to the story as the disturbing polarities of entitlement and genuine compassion he exudes. Admittedly, my reading probably says as much about my regard for the priesthood as it does Shanley’s intended subtext.

Personally, I’m more than fine with ambiguity—hell, Rashomon’s one of my favourite movies—if it yields something resonant or provocative about the subject being considered, and Doubt is absolutely engaging in this sense, thick with portent, psychological struggle, dynamic characterizations, uncomfortable questions. Yet, if anything, Shanley’s directorial style isn’t ambiguous enough. His is a strained sort of classicism, with ostentatiously skewed angles in moments fraught with paranoia. (A chamber drama about spiritual unease and all-too earthly temptations that relies on tight shots of faces negotiating how much can or cannot be reveled: we are very much in Ingmar Bergman territory here, and there were moments while watching Doubt that I really missed the late master.) Shanley’s approach is an odd mix of conservatism and flamboyance, and feels neither here not here. Still, the dialogues really grab you, the silences chill you, the photography, courtesy of Roger Deakins, is crisp, contained and magnificent. And the actors are most often brilliantly nuanced, even if one in particular, for better of for worse, really stands out from the others.

Streep’s is a fussed-over performance, featuring the broadest accent and most severe facial mask of the ensemble, a pale pinched pout under red-rimmed eyes that peers out from under that black bonnet in a way that renders Aloysius a spinster sucking on some holy lemon that she proudly refuses to reject. Yet I don’t think Streep’s detractors are going to convince anyone who’s actually seen this movie that her performance is anything less than riveting, driving every scene right to its precipice of tension—you can call her affected, but every affectation is loaded with purpose, and nothing is wasted.

The sole moment where Streep genuinely falters would have to be the film’s final one, a brief, sudden emotional thaw pitched to function as the sort of transcendental release perfected by Robert Bresson in Pickpocket (1959), and emulated in numerous movies since, most notably, and most effectively, in American Gigolo (80) and L’Enfant (05). But I think Shanley should probably be the one to ultimately take the heat for this limpid finale. Where he could have left us with a devastating whisper and fade, with another disarming close-up, he’s opted for weepy collapse, rising music and crane shot. Instead of drawing us in he casts out of the emotion, giving us no room to feel anything on our own. He may argue that he’s simply giving the audience the sort of big closing uplift they need, but what can I say? I have my doubts.