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.” 

                  

Remembering the great Philip Seymour Hoffman: our 2005 interview

Still reeling from the awful news of Philip Seymour Hoffman's death. Unbelievably sad. I thought of the only time I was able to interview him, for Vue Weekly, back in 2005, about Capote, the film for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor. That was before this blog, so I'd never posted the piece before. One small way of remembering this wonderful, prolific, singular actor. Apropos of the film's subject, we wound up talking about death. 

In Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, his spell-binding account of a 
senseless murder in a rural community and its aftermath, no single figure
touched by the events, however briefly, passes through without some 
significant establishment of character; no detail regarding the actions,
ideas, feelings or even dreams of the people featured in these pages seem
 beyond the author’s narrative reach. The crystalline detail and flights
 of poetry of In Cold Blood are so rich as to truly substantiate 
Capote’s identifying the book a “non-fiction novel.” Yet 
something conspicuously absent from the book is Capote himself, who exists
only as our phantom guide, netting the dense psychological trauma surrounding 
these murders without leaving so much as a fingerprint in his wake.

Bennett Miller’s Capote, in its evocatively
 compact, largely visual way, also vibrates with novelistic detail, its 
austere framing of the Kansas countryside where the Clutter family met their 
deaths (recalling Bergman’s Winter Light) and the gestures it captures
from its players (especially Chris Cooper and Clifton Collins Jr.) tell us 
volumes about the grief, isolation, anger and trust that haunts the
 characters with impressive economy. Yet here, Capote is no phantom but an
active participant, an urbane, disarmingly effeminate outsider who appears in 
striking contrast to his surroundings.

Adapted by Dan Futterman from Gerald Clarke’s biography of the same
 name, Capote follows Capote as he tries to find In Cold Blood, to coax his 
masterpiece out of the unruly shadows of real life, to almost literally 
distil the book from its source, and in doing so, develop intimate 
relationships—especially with convicted killer Perry Smith—that 
shroud his blatant journalistic ambitions, causing one character to wonder if 
the book’s title is a reference to the murders or to the way Capote
 exploits his subjects. (The obvious third alternative reading of the title
 would be in reference to capital punishment.) A quietly provocative film, 
Capote is a critical portrait of a journalist in an ethical whirlpool, its 
only problem being its title and its closing title card, which inevitably
 reduce Capote to this single, if very powerful, period in his career.

At the film’s heart is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as
 Capote, blending virtuosic technical work—he uncannily speaks 
Capote’s distinctive voice without sounding like a
caricature—with brilliant instinct for playing a delicate scene
forcefully, as well as on a number of other levels. He so fully inhabits his 
role that there’s no niggling sense of his steering us toward
 developing sympathies, antipathies or any one interpretation. Also one of
 Capote’s executive producers, Hoffman has an unusual dual perspective 
on the film and its particular meaning for him. 

JB: Biopics are frequently infused with this false air of resolution 
and redemption, but Capote takes a highly critical approach of its subject. 
Given your task, was it difficult for you to compartmentalize the 
film’s implications about Capote, your own feelings about Capote and
 your role embodying Capote?

Philip Seymour Hoffman: I didn’t know much about Capote when I first 
took the job, so at the start I was genuinely unbiased. As an actor, I went 
into this always trying to support his angle. That’s my work. But sure,
 looking from the outside I was quite aware of the harsh light that needed to 
be shone on him. I mean, that’s the story of this movie and I think it 
has a lot to say about the subsequent 20 years of Capote’s life.

JB: So when you’re playing Capote, how do you come to terms with the 
precarious way he conducts himself with his subjects?

PSH: I look at it like this: He has this person he’s talking to
who’s murdered an entire family, so if Capote’s withholding
information or lying to this man, there’s justification to be found in 
this very crude fact. Beside that, I think his ambition was burning him up 
inside; he was almost helpless under the blaze of white light he was walking 
toward. And then the other thing is that I think he’s very attracted to
Perry. He becomes close to both Perry and Dick and deals with each
compassionately in his book. So I think he had ways to justify his actions. 
Of course it’s a no-win situation. He can’t have this book and 
this success and have Perry lingering. Perry needs to die for this work to 
come to life.

JB: Reading In Cold Blood after seeing Capote, I was very aware of the erotic
element of Perry and Dick’s characterizations. It contributed to this 
sense of ambiguity regarding Capote’s true feelings: is he really drawn
 to these guys as much as he is repulsed, or is he purely manipulating them 
into false friendship for his own purposes?

PSH: He’s having all of these feelings for these men and is nonetheless
 manipulating them at the same time. That’s what made the script so good. Yet I also think it’s very clear that his objective is always to
get these men to trust him and tell him stuff. In that sense I don’t 
know what you mean by ambiguity.

JB: I suppose it’s just that thing that happens when we’re caught 
up in a movie. For me at least, while in the thick of it, I hope that
 Capote’s compassion or loyalty might run deeper than it does. It was 
only at a point in the last third or so that I could no longer doubt his
 fundamental ruthlessness. Until then, I’m still swayed by him telling
 Harper Lee that he’s in love.

PSH: And he is! He does love him—but he also knows that the book is
 going to be the best thing that ever happened to him. Both things are real.
 And that’s what causes the tragedy. It’s complex, but it’s 
not ambiguous because those feelings are real.

JB: Something that separates Capote distinctly from Capote’s writing is 
how it works on the level of self-reflection. In a sense, it’s a
 fiction about a real person making a fiction about a real event.

PSH: Absolutely. We’re not making a documentary. There needs to be
certain liberties taken in order to… well, in order to still tell the 
truth; the truth as we see it. But that’s the same thing Capote does in 
his book: it’s all factual, but from his angle. He provides a perspective and I think that’s valuable. Otherwise it’s just a 
document. The artistry lends itself to discovering other truths.

JB: Perhaps one of these truths arises from the way the film reveals a 
proliferation of murder, the murder of the family allowing for the murder of 
the murderers. These murders, without superfluous commentary, bookend the 
story, in a way that reminded me of Kieslowski’s A Short Film About
 Killing. Death flows through these films. And this is also alluded to in the 
book, when, near the beginning, Capote writes about “four shotgun 
blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.”

PSH: You’re quite right, he’s very clear about those numbers and
 their consequences. Yet I have to say that I never thought about that theory 
in making the film because it’s not very actable. Themes aren’t 
things you can think about when you’re acting. Really, I think the film 
is less about the death penalty than it is about compromise and betrayal, and 
is it worth the price you pay? But you’ve hit on something in that,
although it might not seem like it, you do see a lot of death in the movie. 
In a way, it’s like Capote has come to bear witness to all these 
deaths. And the truth he discovers is that they don’t pass through him 
without leaving marks.

           

The music never ends

The title of A Late Quartet holds at least two meanings, one to do with Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14, Opus 131, written during the final year of the composer’s life, and one to do with the musicians at the film’s center, celebrated collaborators for some 25 years who suddenly find themselves splintering apart due to a mixture of illness, professional dissatisfaction and marital strife. From a cool distance, much of the drama looks fairly conventional, even soapy. The script, by director Yaron Zilberman and co-scenarist Seth Grossman, is a tidy arrangement of rising tensions and carefully graded complexities, of betrayals, struggles and fresh alliances. The four protagonists (plus one—there is a young budding musician added to the mix) allows for a tasteful, not too busy amount of shifting between narrative threads. But I think A Late Quartet transcends its conventions in more ways than one. It’s the product of a filmmaker who clearly believes in the integrity of great music and of the musicians who devote their lives to bringing great music to fierce, fluid, glorious life. It doesn’t hurt that the actors are uniformly superb.

Peter (Christopher Walken), the cellist, is the Fugue Quartet’s eldest member, a widower who learns he’s experiencing the early stages of Parkinson’s. For Robert (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the news of Peter’s condition functions as a reminder of life’s bracing brevity; Robert’s weary of being second violinist, of being an underappreciated husband to violist Juliette (Catherine Keener), of having the group constantly take its cues from Daniel (Mark Ivanir), the rather stodgy first violinist, who always chooses perfection over passion—though his passions seem set to be awakened by Alexandra (Imogen Poots), his attractive, assured young student, who also happens to be Robert and Juliette’s daughter. Despite Peter’s affliction the group chooses to forge ahead with a planned performance of the Opus 131, a challenging, gorgeously detailed piece of approximately 40 minutes which demands that each of the musicians play at a brisk pace, without pause even to retune. There’s an engaging, relaxed scene in which Peter tells his class an anecdote about a misunderstanding he once had with Pablo Casals; the moral of the story is to never underestimate the potential for innovation or freshness in what seem in the moment like mistakes. But Peter’s too long in the tooth to allow himself to fumble his way through a piece of music he reveres, or to diminish the power of what he and his colleagues have worked so hard to develop.

The final scene of A Late Quartet, very nicely cut together by Yuval Shar (from coverage shot by the great Frederick Elmes), is thus very moving not only for the beauty of Beethoven’s music or the actors’ performances or our familiarity with the characters and their individual problems, but because, whether or not we know anything about music, we’ve also been led to understand what at stake artistically. This is a film about what it means to be an artist, the sacrifices made, the heights that can be reached, the discoveries made along the way. None of this is a revelation, but it is wise. And Walken most especially is at his best here. His strange cadences and embodying of jumbled emotions are a kind of music all their own. Walken alone is reason to see (and hear) this film. 

      

Every mind a battlefield

A lot of guys came back from the war a little messed up, but what messed up Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) must have started long before he went to sea. He father died from drink and his mother wound up institutionalized; now Freddie boozes with an uncommon passion for oblivion and responds to the world with equal parts naïveté and rage. In early scenes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master we see Freddie drain something out of a torpedo and a little later get creative with darkroom fluids. He’s poisoning himself—and others—for shits and giggles. He can make some kind of barely digestible homebrew out of just about anything; this is one of Freddie’s genuine talents, the other being portrait photography, though he loses his first postwar department store job when he gets into a fight with a customer for no apparent reason, other than the acceleration of the inevitable. The Master is, among other things, a portrait of Freddie; so much of this picture is made of portraits, haunting images of eyes and mouths, heads and shoulders, necklines and hairlines, captured by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare in gorgeous, dizzyingly detail-saturated 65mm images, that at times mirror the softening gaze of its deranged central character, that render every wrinkle, blink and lip-tremble as dramatically as the movement of armies across a battlefield. Indeed, faces, and the minds behind the faces, are battlefields upon which wills are bent and self-realization is a merciless, violent endeavour.

Always in a gorilla hunch and cradling his injured kidneys, Freddie moves from job to job, place to place. He may have killed a man who looked like his father. He’ll never know for sure; he ran from the scene. So he shambles; he is a shambles. Until, in 1950, he meets Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), author, self-declared scientist, what we now call a New Age guru, a fictional figure many observers have pegged as a stand-in for Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Freddie stows away on the borrowed yacht on which Dodd is marrying off his daughter, and Freddie is immediately taken under Master’s wing. Freddie and Dodd recognize each other as the unlikeliest of kindred spirits (literally; they’re sure they met in a another life), chosen father and chosen son, another of Anderson’s surrogate families (see Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, et cetera; families sprout like fungus on Anderson’s broad canvases). Dodd likes Freddie’s hooch and psychic malleability; Freddie likes Dodd’s paternal attention and fraternal, vaguely (or not so vaguely) homoerotic affection and apparent belief in his untapped potential. Freddie submits himself to “processing,” to answering Dodd’s standardized questions, many of them bringing up painful memories, a bastard hybrid of psychoanalysis and past life-regression hypnosis. (This scene, the two men below deck, a few swigs of hi-test swill already in their bellies, with only a microphone between them, with the focus so shallow that all there ever is on screen is one furiously alive face, just the surface of a face, is itself one of the most riveting pieces of cinema you’ll see this year, I promise.) Central to Dodd’s theories is the idea that man is not an animal, but Freddie is about as animal as any man can get. He’s also devoted to Dodd, at least until he can’t take it anymore, or until he feels abandoned. These men need each other, and this dark, fluid and captivating film is about the intensity and eventual collapse of their codependency.  

There’s so much to The Master, its fusion of classicism and narrative idiosyncrasies ,some akin to literature than cinema per se; its very noir protagonist (imagine Robert Ryan in the Nicolas Ray version); its shifts in rhythm, its silences and now-cantering, now-shimmering music, from Radiohead’s spindly genius Johnny Greenwood; its commentaries on religion, state and commerce; its slips into reverie (the moment when every women becomes naked, when phones are brought to you while sleeping in movie houses); its sensual beauty and monumental sadness; its performances, perhaps most of all: Hoffman’s mesmerizing, Wellesian convergence of hysteria and colossal confidence; Amy Adams’ pedagogical tones and velvet-iron control as Dodd’s wife, the master behind the master; and Phoenix’s go-for-broke yet unnervingly real embracing of alcoholic derangement, childish longings, internal bleeding, and broken masculinity. (A key visual motif: the image of Naval Officer Freddie on some beach in the Pacific, snuggling up to a woman sculpted from sand, all generous breasts and spread-apart legs, Freddie’s feminine ideal—until the tide sweeps her away. Watch his fellow officers looks of growing discomfort as Freddie engages in too elaborate, protracted play-sex with her. ) The film will draw different ratios of unease and awe in different viewers, but I feel no reservations about called The Master a masterpiece, with all the provocations and points of contention that term implies.