A Rare Talent, A Lingering Absence

 From City Journal:

Eight and a half years have passed since the February 2014 death of Philip Seymour Hoffman of a heroin overdose at age 46. Hoffman’s absence still provokes sadness. He was not quite a movie star; he was something much better. Only in retrospect has the scale of his ambition become clear. One role at a time, he was trying to take on the whole of our collective experience, to get inside the loneliness, the self-loathing, and the desperation—above all, the desperation—of life in a nation poking at its own psychic wounds.

Hoffman’s most durable role was probably in Capote, for which he won an Academy Award in 2005. He portrayed writer Truman Capote during a pivotal period in Capote’s career—as he researched and composed his greatest book, the true-crime story In Cold Blood. The book both made Capote’s reputation and drained him emotionally, beginning the moral and physical collapse that ended in his premature death. Totally lacking in physical vanity, Hoffman made himself smaller, raised his voice several octaves, mastered Capote’s distinctive gestures. It was a triumph not merely of technique but of understanding. Hoffman played Capote as a man both exquisitely self-possessed and entirely captive to his own ambition. Hoffman could underline Capote’s self-deceptions in his pursuit of the truth about the murders of the Clutter family because he understood the artistic stakes the writer was playing for.

Contrast Capote with Hoffman’s performance in Sidney Lumet’s 2007 crime thriller Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. As he is delicate in Capote, here he is bullying and brutal. His Andy, an inept criminal and a worse son and brother, is hateful and cruelly manipulative. He brings ruin and death to the people around him. But Hoffman connects us to Andy’s need, just as he connected us to Capote’s, and when Andy breaks open in a pivotal scene, we see the unloved little boy he once was. As his plan unravels, Andy commits terrible violence, but he never quite loses our sympathy.

Hoffman was interested in male sexual frustration and dysfunction. In Happiness, he played a proto-incel, a man who feels an overwhelming need to express himself sexually but has no way to connect. His Jacob in 25th Hour and Scotty J. in Boogie Nights are rendered almost mute by obsession. These men have pornography at their fingertips, but sexual intimacy is on the other side of the moon. His Lester Bangs in Almost Famous delivers an aria for the uncool, telling a journalistic protégé that “women will always be a problem for guys like us.” In Doubt, Hoffman invites the audience to consider that his Father Flynn, a man of intelligence and wit—a man who truly cares for children—might also be a predator.

In a nation increasingly defined by its addictions, Hoffman himself was an addict. He was dependent at various times on alcohol and heroin, and more loosely, on food and cigarettes (“anything by mouth,” he joked). He played addicts time and again. Capote’s life was destroyed by alcohol. Hoffman’s grieving widower in Love Liza sniffs gasoline. Of course, anyone can play a crazed dope fiend, as Frank Sinatra did to dubious effect (and an Academy Award nomination) in The Man With The Golden Arm. Hoffman merged the addictions of his characters into their broader psychology, their peculiar sense of what was missing and what they were owed. An actor must be specific, and no one was more specific about suffering than Hoffman.

Hoffman’s consuming career and early death invite the cliché of the suffering artist. He would have rejected this idea as the kind of lazy first thought he worked to get past in his roles. Heroin killed Hoffman, just as heroin and other opioids will kill 50,000 Americans this year who are not as gifted or driven as he was. It would be speciously romantic, then, to say that fame or self-imposed pressure was what led to his death. (Read more.)

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