Memories of Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman was my favorite actor. More importantly, Philip Seymour Hoffman taught me what it meant to have a favorite actor. I’m certain I share this with many in my generation: the refusal to lionize the best in a certain craft due to the demystification of our heroes. Every musician beloved by this age range has a skeleton that has collapsed out of their closet. Every athlete has been revealed by 24-hour news coverage to be frightfully inarticulate. And every actor has, naturally, been handicapped by an industry’s ever-increasing interest in toys. Actors as brands no longer exist, and a performer you liked onscreen could likely be found participating in a film that was beneath them, that had subject matter completely alien to them. They could not be heroes; they were surrendering to the whims of an unseen storyteller. Often that storyteller would be a corporation.

Hoffman was different. Hoffman seemed to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. But he had to lay the foundation for this moment. I remember him first as Anonymous Co-Star, a face to fill in the margins of forgettable films. When he popped up in Scent Of A Woman and Patch Adams, the untrained eye would pinpoint him as straight-man scum, the sort of actor you’d recruit to make another seem funnier, more attractive, more enjoyable. You wouldn’t guess that the same actor would later materialize in the gloriously stupid Twister, a summer blockbuster that apparently had an opening for an obnoxious fat guy. When you watch that film again, and you actively look for Hoffman, you realize that, for him, there were no throwaway parts. He bellows, brags, and gets the motor running in Twister as one of the tornado jockeys ready to chase some whirlwinds, cheating death and braying like vain livestock. Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were the stars of Twister. Hoffman was close to the actual spirit of the damn thing. His goofball wasn’t having a good time: he was the good time, bursting at the seams with excitement. It’s not a surprise that, even as a bit player, he would end up as one of the ad campaign’s focal points.

It would also take a revisit to realize that this sad, frustrated little man in Boogie Nights was also Hoffman. You can’t blame someone for not spotting him sooner. Boogie Nights, with its loaded cast, remains a contender for The Movie Of The ‘90s, a breakneck, coke-fueled, recklessly affectionate look at the world of 1970s pornography. It’s loaded with comic affectations that one soon realizes are deadly serious, chief amongst those the wardrobe of Hoffman’s Scotty J., the most reliable porno soundman in the valley. Hoffman early on revealed a desire to avoid, and sometimes actively shun, vanity. Not once during that film’s roughly decade-long span does Scotty wear a shirt that fits. His unrequited love for Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk Diggler is felt from the very first close-up through Scotty’s eyes, and the rest of the film is spent with Scotty attempting to strike a pose, or hold his arms over his stomach, to hide his fleshier bits, to keep the emotion from spilling out of him. Hoffman played the role with a dangerous edge: here was the possibly kindest character in the narrative, but also the one most likely to destroy himself. Seeing Scotty filming Buck’s Super Store promo at the end is maybe the happiest ending Hoffman ever truly received.

Funny enough, it was his lack of vanity that turned Hoffman into a big screen leading man. Todd Solondz’s toxic Happiness goes all the places the early-2000s “Hell-is-suburbia” diversions wouldn’t dream. It’s a film about profoundly broken people going through the motions as their petty vices threaten to break relatively unremarkable lives to pieces. Solondz is like a surgeon who likes to open up a body and joke about a man’s digestive tract, and he seemed to find the ideal organ in Hoffman. There are many famous masturbation scenes in film, but not many famous masturbators. As a lost pervert, Hoffman somehow found the desperation and empathy within a crank caller who constantly has one hand down his briefs, hopefully listening for a breath on the other line that would titillate. An Independent Spirit Award nomination forced people to look up and notice: this sweaty, abrasive, unkempt slob was bringing a lot more to the page than what was initially there.

Hoffman the star was a very strange entity. He couldn’t become the “acting hero” previous generations enjoyed, mostly because it seemed like Hoffman actively disdained it. In interviews he seemed distant, standoffish. While he wasn’t humorless, he was not necessarily present, and lacked the patience or people-pleasing charisma to be a media darling. Jason Sudeikis used to do Hoffman on Saturday Night Live, and it consisted of him hiding behind his own beard, flummoxed, half-awake and unable to find the words to express himself. It amused me every time he would do this impersonation to puzzled silence from a studio crowd. When I saw Hoffman at a tenth anniversary screening of The 25^th Hour, he willingly ceded attention to Spike Lee and Edward Norton and showed barely any interest in speaking. It was nighttime, and yet his disheveled look placed even money on the odds that he had just gotten out of bed.

His breakout year was 1999, and each performance seemed miles away from the last. Flawless was a middling melodrama that allowed Hoffman to do drag alongside Robert De Niro, albeit for hack director Joel Schumacher. Meanwhile, he would receive heavy-duty award attention for both Magnolia and The Talented Mr. Ripley, a surprise given that each featured loaded casts. In Ripley, Hoffman plays his amused Freddie Miles as if he’s read the script ahead of time, twirling the central mystery of Tom Ripley on his fingertips. There’s a finely-tuned ounce of camp to this turn, but Hoffman’s body and facial motions seem frozen, as if he’s a man used to tap dancing on eggshells. When he flashes his shit-eating grin at Matt Damon’s Ripley, it’s as if he’s hinting that the two of them had danced that tango once before in a previous life.

Magnolia cemented Hoffman as PT Anderson’s lucky rabbit foot. Following Boogie Nights and Hard Eight, this was their third collaboration, and though on paper it’s another wallflower character like Scotty J., you can barely recognize Hoffman at this point. His brow is a little more harsh, his frown more natural. He still had a boyish gait in his earlier films, but in this three-hour monster of a movie, equal parts ambitious and ridiculous, he had aged into a man. Which made his beta-male leanings seem that much more humiliating: when he shares the screen with Tom Cruise, as cock-thrusting, shit-talking T.J. Mackey, it’s as if Hoffman positively cowers in his presence. Cruise would get the Oscar nomination, but Hoffman would win the National Board Of Review Award. The jocks of the movie critic world favored the massive star, but the nerds went with Hoffman.

Filmmakers came to know Hoffman as a performer who would treat the screenwriter’s words like music. Maybe it was his theater background that allowed him to absolutely slay in David Mamet ‘s State And Main, and maybe it was Hoffman’s innate intelligence that allowed him to truly understand the words. Maybe it was two like-minded creative people, Hoffman the engaged-introvert and Mamet the interrogating satirist, taking a cleaver to Hollywood self-involvement. It’s telling that Hoffman was fingered as an “industry guy” in both State And Main and Almost Famous, the latter as rock critic Lester Bangs. Hoffman’s basically deployed as a secret weapon in Cameron Crowe’s coming-of-age story, and it’s a part that doesn’t last long, but leaves a fingerprint on the entire film. You have to re-watch Almost Famous to actually remember Hoffman isn’t necessarily one of the film’s “stars.”

With Hoffman’s passing, many have reached to Love Liza, one of his saddest and most idiosyncratic films. He leads the film as a widower who can’t come to terms with the suicide of his wife, actively refusing to open the letter she left behind for him. I always remembered Love Liza as the work of director Todd Louiso, who had played Barry, the lovelorn loner in High Fidelity, with his eggy bald pate and sunken, skinny shoulders. Surely there must have been a shared reservoir of loneliness between he and Hoffman. Louiso later made other films, and I only saw one of them, a barely-released slapstick fest with Jason Schwartzman and Ben Stiller that led me to believe Louiso, who did a brilliant job on Love Liza, needed his spiritual companion. Back when IFC was something of an independent film institution and not just another cable channel, this was one of their frequent programming options. In spite of the devastating subject matter, I would always try to see it again, catch some sort of nuance to Hoffman’s work that I had previously missed.

There was something a bit disappointing about the idea of Hoffman as a go-to guy moreso than someone you build a film around. In the indie world, he could lead Love Liza, but in the big leagues, he was still seen as a utility player. He basically serves the same function in Cold Mountain and the ill-advised Red Dragon update. The latter is studio offal, with Hoffman’s purpose to serve as a garish murder victim. The former, in a film I actually like, finds him as borderline bumbling comic relief. Hoffman keeps threatening to reveal a new depth to that character, but the picture stringently refuses him, so set on him being something of a jester. He pops up in another P.T. Anderson joint around this time – the spartan love story Punch Drunk Love, but it’s more of a favor than anyone else, Hoffman bringing some gravitas to a comic villain that’s all bellowing bullshit fury. Credit to Hoffman, who makes sure his barely-there screentime becomes the most memorable moment in the film. No one had his room-enveloping scream, a howl of fury that echoed through the halls, shaking as if it were scared of itself.

It wasn’t until Owning Mahowny that I realized Hoffman had become my favorite onscreen personality. I don’t recall what made me rent this film, an otherwise unremarkable-looking Canadian feature where Hoffman sports a typically-unflattering mustache.  Hoffman had earned my respect, but I was not yet a completist of his work, and the critical reception for this picture was positive, but not exactly rapturous. I don’t recall many of the plot specifics and have not seen the film since then. I remember there was gambling, possibly some illegal activity, a grave John Hurt performance, and an unlikely romantic pairing of Hoffman with Minnie Driver. I also remembered hating the title: I have always been a stickler for titles, and was embarrassed to be renting something with such a cutesy half-rhyming scheme.

What I can tell you from this film is that Hoffman’s character was a paragon of stillness. In moments when he was alone (usually at a craps table), his quiet intensity made the whole world go away. Hurt’s expectedly good in his small part, and Driver unexpectedly convincing as a long-suffering wife, but Hoffman was on another level. Playing a relatively unremarkable, quiet man, Hoffman’s silent stare was the most captivating element onscreen, and it would take an earthquake to get you to look away. When I was a kid, Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects made me want to be an actor. Hoffman in Owning Mahowny made me realize that was probably a fool’s errand.

By the time Capote came along, I was protective of him, acting like an obnoxious rock fan. Bennett Miller’s debut film landed Hoffman his biggest outpouring of support, and to me it was like the moment your favorite band shows up on TV. Hoffman hadn’t sold out: Capote is a chilly melodrama with very few temperature-raising moments, never truly destined for hit status. But to me, his excellence went from a consistent thrill to a complete non-surprise, and to see this sudden mass celebration of his talents seemed insincere. Hoffman had been anointed by Hollywood, gifted with an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and an Independent Spirit Award. Why wasn’t he winning those awards every year? And why not for a film other than Capote, a picture I found, and still find, airless, pointlessly macabre, and flat-out boring? Hoffman is typically good in the lead, but he’s a big man and a big personality being forced to squeeze, uncomfortably, into Truman Capote’s diminutive shoes. The rumor, since denied, was that Heath Ledger, also nominated that year in the Best Actor category, had told someone that the award was meant for “best acting, not most acting.” Given the fact that Hoffman had been better in so much already (and that Ledger was truly terrific in Brokeback Mountain), I choose to believe that.

Did Hoffman think he was going to lose the Oscar? It certainly explains him surfacing in the next year’s Mission: Impossible III. There are all sorts of stupid plot machinations in the third entry of the “Tom Cruise Is In Great Shape And Sprints Like A Madman” series, most of them carried out by Hoffman’s Owen Davian. But you don’t focus on Ethan Hunt’s IMF team, nor do you wonder what’s going on with the “Rabbit’s Foot” everyone is chasing. Instead, you actually start to worry about what Davian is going to do to Cruise’s Hunt. Each of the Mission: Impossible films load up on the spectacle, but in the third, the trailer’s “money shot” moment is when Hoffman cold-bloodedly threatens to find and kill Hunt’s girlfriend. It’s an idle threat given some extra teeth by Hoffman, and it doesn’t seem altogether unusual. But when Davian says he’s going to “hurt” her, for some reason that seems like the more immediate threat, the way he chews into the word, the way Hoffman relishes being tied down and still making the world’s biggest movie star sweat. To kill was something the forgettable rogues in the other Mission: Impossible films would attempt. To hurt was entirely Hoffman.

The Cruise film would end up only being a tryout for Sidney Lumet’s Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. It’s Ethan Hawke’s film, which is to say he’s in many more scenes than Hoffman, and to only say that. Hawke, terrific, is a desperate mess in the film, but only because of his scheming brother personified by a sulfur-stench-clad Hoffman. In silver suits and with slicked-back hair that might as well be parted by dollar bills, Hoffman’s vulgar thug sneers and barks like a guard dog. It’s the type of role Jack Nicholson would be playing in his forties and fifties had he not attempted to be a charismatic leading man: absolutely reptilian in every sense, as sexual as an angry lubricated phallus.

From this point on, Hoffman was late ‘90s Mark McGwire, blasting home runs almost every time up-to-bat. He got to be warm and weary in The Savages, and exasperated and bemused in Charlie Wilson’s War. By the time audiences got to see Doubt, it was no longer an adaptation of a Tony Award-winning play, but a marquee attraction: Hoffman Vs. Meryl Streep. The film is so sparse and free of b-plot incidence that it sets up the central conflict like a Toho Studios offering. Hoffman had become the industry’s best actor, but also one of its most generous, and he finds an adversarial chemistry with Streep that lets fireworks go off from both directions. It’s the same collaborative energy that ceded The Savages to Laura Linney, and Charlie Wilson’s War to the more marketable duo of Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. In that latter case, Hoffman could only smirk with confidence: he’s the one who walked away from that film with an Oscar nomination, an honor that his hilarious Gust Avrakotos almost seems to already be carrying in his back pocket by that film’s close.

Hoffman tried his hand at directing with Jack Goes Boating, and while it was rough around the edges, it does disappoint that it would be his only time behind the camera. Hoffman’s limo-driving sadsack resembles early Ernest Borgnine in its gentle romantic poetry, and you would hope that as a director Hoffman would have kept recruiting Amy Ryan and John Ortiz as good luck charms. Ironically, parts like his truth-spinning power-broker in The Ides Of March started to resemble paycheck gigs for Hoffman’s considerably more modest endeavors, some of which occurred onstage. Hoffman never seemed less than interested in actual acting, and if he could accept having to be second banana in “March” alongside other skilled peers like Paul Giamatti and Jeffrey Wright, then I could too.

I was particularly tickled at Hoffman doing Bennett Miller a favor by showing up in Moneyball as the A’s manager Art Howe. Though I had skimmed Moneyball, a book that ultimately has little relation to the film, I remembered watching Oakland’s improbable in-season run, observing the clash of personalities on-field and off. Hoffman had little to anything in common with the real-life Howe, a thin gentleman with a decade or two on Hoffman himself. Having seen Howe retreat to manage the Mets, my Mets, as they spiraled down the toilet, I believed the reports of Howe being a conservative-minded dunce developing ineffectual relationships with his clubhouses.

What resulted instead was Hoffman creating an entirely new characterization, one where Howe was the voice of discontent and anger in the dugout. I want to believe that Howe was as minor a character in the finished script as he was in the book itself, given that so much of what Hoffman does is with his eyes and his shoulders, wordlessly expressing dissatisfaction with Brad Pitt’s forever-tinkering Billy Beane. During the rest of the narrative, Beane was a trailblazing pioneer. In Howe’s office, he was a glory-chasing cheapskate. Hoffman’s constantly bleak demeanor and endless humiliation is, by itself, its own comedy of errors.

In his final years, there are two performances that still stick. The Master greeted me in that mature manner of when you’ve aged and learned to manage your expectations appropriately, while also maintaining a critical eye. Which is to say it was not what I was expecting, except for the fact that it was yet another transformative P.T. Anderson-Hoffman collaboration. Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd was all of Hoffman’s most endearing traits, wrapped up in a tragically fallible human being. Which is to say he was repellant and seductive, hilarious, and dead-serious. Dodd’s sermons and speeches are blustery masterpieces because Dodd has commandeered the framework of the narrative, hoping he can wing it with the specifics. It’s a tightrope performance of a man on a tightrope: Hoffman is given enough of a comfort zone by Anderson to portray his contradictions just as Dodd constantly teeters on the edge of taste, sense, and the law. It’s a giant performance.

And in Synecdoche, New York, Hoffman’s surrogate is Caden Cotard, a playwright on a quixotic quest to create a work of great honesty. What happens over the course of Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut is a conceptual maze that lost most viewers and critics, as Cotard begins to assemble an acting troupe that creates their own world from deep within a cavernous warehouse (which, inevitably, houses another warehouse). Hoffman’s Cotard is a broken man at the film’s start, shepherding his own stage version of Death Of A Salesman as Hoffman once did. He proceeds to lose his wife, his child, and the basic functions of his own body as the amorphous project persists over years, then decades, all the way through what looks to be an apocalypse in the outside world.

If Hoffman was on the same path, was he on a detour? It kills me that, upon seeing him in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I immediately wondered what grave indiscretion led him to this empty blockbuster. Was it child support payments? Investments gone south? A drug relapse, always a candid issue for him? Looking haggard and disinterested, Hoffman sleepwalked through the role, casting worry that his improbable run of great performances had garnered him no peace of mind, no happiness, and no financial freedom. And though he has a couple more films coming out, his role as Plutarch Heavensbee will be his inglorious final appearance onscreen, in 2015’s The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2. He was my favorite actor on the planet, and now he is no longer of this planet.

But if I think really hard, he’s still the graying Caden; he’s still barking orders in that coarse baritone to anyone who’ll listen. His words still fly with spit and venom, and his brow still furrows with intelligence. And Caden isn’t gone, he hasn’t left. He’s finally found a way to finish his work. He’s merely built another warehouse within a warehouse within a warehouse, forever completing his “project,” completing the greatest contemporary body of work of which an actor could only dream.