Six Favorites from Philip Seymour Hoffman

On February 2nd, 2014, Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his apartment in West Village, Manhattan. He’s my favorite actor and I can’t help but wonder what his career would’ve been like and the performances we could have had over the last seven years. I loved his commitment to a part regardless of the film, not in a method acting way, but in a way that he gives himself entirely to a role without thinking of how good the rest of the film will be. He had a preternatural ability to leave behind whatever the last film you may have seen him in was and adopt his character on screen, being a man of incredible kindness, extreme grief, or a truly villainous figure. Here are my six favorite performances of his.

6. Andy Hanson, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

There are a number of movies I saw way too early either because my parents showed them to me, I took them off their DVD shelf, or pirated them; I’m glad Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead wasn’t one of them. This film is deranged and some of the events in it have stuck with me longer than the climaxes of most horror movies, it’s worth a watch, but I’d tread lightly on who you watch it with. Hoffman’s performance as Andy accomplishes that villainous nature I mentioned earlier. While it isn’t the same sort of evil that you’d find in Mission Impossible III, it’s a conniving and deceitful nature that will help set up a robbery of his parent’s jewelry store in order to pay back his debts and fuel his drug addiction. To say he controls every scene wouldn’t make sense, because so often throughout the film he is displaying extreme fear or remorse, but his performance is more like an animal trapped in a cage, shifting from fight to flight at a moment’s notice. Throughout this post, I’ll reference Hoffman’s penchant for vulnerability, but his vulnerability in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is like watching a wounded snake, it’s a sight to behold. This film feels forgotten by a lot of people, being in the greatest film year of the 21st century, but Sidney Lumet’s final work is wonderful.

5. Wilson Joel, Love Liza

This pick is for my friend Joey and only my friend Joey. Love Liza is pitched as a tragic comedy about a husband recovering from his wife’s unexpected suicide, which is an absurd way to pitch it because I rarely found it funny, despite thinking it never dipped below the threshold of great for its entire 90-minute runtime. To say “you can tell this actor has struggled with addiction before, they really sell it” is an awful thing to say about someone, but Phil seems to pull from his life and difficulties, as Wilson is burying his grief beneath the gallons of unleaded and synthetic fuel he’s huffing. It’s an extremely idiosyncratic performance because all of his responses to the events taking place feel “real”, but certainly not typical. It’s difficult to say how someone would respond to the sudden loss of a partner who then leaves them a note that they are too afraid to read, maybe it would look like Wilson Joel. One thing I do find extremely compelling about Love Liza is the feeling that this isn’t the end for our main character. I believed that with time, admitting there was an issue, support from his family, and professional help, that Wilson could heal and move forward in life. Chalk that up however you will, to Phil’s performance, to his brother Gordy’s script, or my own belief that addicts are worthy of help and always have the potential for a better life, regardless Love Liza is pretty special.

4. Phil Parma, Magnolia

Paul Thomas Anderson was interviewed by Marc Maron in 2015, at one point he starts talking about Philip Seymour Hoffman and gives a quote that I think of often and has brought a tear to my eye more than once. In it, he says “I thought that when I saw him for the first time in Scent of a Woman that I knew what true love was, that I knew what love at first sight was. It was the strangest feeling […] thinking ‘he’s for me, I’m for him’”. The relationship between them is one of deep tender friendship, and I can’t help but think of how much it would mean to Phil, that his son Cooper will be in a film for the first time that Paul directed. The beauty of their friendship is that PTA saw the scope of all that Phil was capable of. Phil Parma is one such example, a man of pure goodness, taking care of an aging Jason Robards as a caregiver and nurse. He’s purposefully out of place in the entire film, a ray of kindness that wants so badly to help a bad father reconnect with his misogynistic mess of a son. He gets to deliver some of the only “funny” lines throughout the film, my favorite of which is when he’s trying to get in touch with Frank T.J. Mackey by calling the “Seduce and Destroy” hotline. The way he stops in the middle of his mission to talk to this employee in a call center about his mother’s breast cancer is so sweet and strange and I laugh every time he says “Oh it’s a hell of a disease”. He’s also the only person who can order cigarettes, bread, and porn magazines while at work and still be considered the most morally upstanding person in a film.

3. Dean Trumbull, Punch-Drunk Love

This is the performance on the list with the least amount of screentime but is the film equivalent of Tracy McGrady scoring 13 points in 35 seconds on game time. This is where a list like this gets tricky, because you have to make a decision of whether this is a celebration of an actor’s greatest works or a writer’s favorite of their works, because if we want to discuss the Philip Seymour Hoffman performance I enjoy the most, it has to be Dean Trumbull. A lot of credit needs to be given to Paul Thomas Anderson creating such a character for Phil; in the interview I referenced earlier, PTA mentions that he wanted to create roles that felt a little out of the ordinary for his friends and wants to celebrate their talents beyond the roles that most filmmakers would give them. Dean Trumbull is the capstone of a trilogy of idiosyncratic weirdos in Paul Thomas Anderson films, starting with Scotty J. in Boogie Nights, another performance that breaks my heart to leave off of this list. Trumbull is a self righteous mattress store owner and proprietor of a phone sex hotline that is robbing Adam Sandler’s character blind, but it’s the absurdity of the part that makes it such a joy. Hoffman brings so much energy to the role, accessing all of the aggression he can muster and yet when confronted by someone who can match his aggression and intensity, he turtles. It’s in all the screaming and emotion that he shows just how funny he is, using his arrogance and self importance as a way to tell you it is okay to laugh at him. It’s a perfect performance in a perfect film and even writing this I’m debating whether it belongs at three or at the top.

2. Caden Cotard, Synecdoche, New York

The performance at the center of Synecdoche, New York is the fictional equivalent of the epic biopic; following the life of a suburban theater director who becomes the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship grant and chooses to use the grant to create what he believes to be his masterpiece, play about New York City. Cotard is presented as an oft unaware and self obsessed director and play-write who is seeking to make this massive piece of art that he’s inserted himself into as a character, but spends more time inventing things for the character of Caden than the director Caden. I’m firmly in the camp that writer director Charlie Kaufman is a genius, so I view Synecdoche, New York as a metatextual masterpiece, but it’s just as easy to view everything in the film, including Hoffman’s performance, as self aggrandizing trash. It’s that meta text that makes Hoffman’s performance impressive, though. There’s plenty of times in film of which actors have portrayed actors or filmmakers or play-writes, but the additional level of trying to show how a creatives obsession with life, death, art, and text can become blinding to the life happening around them. There’s a beauty to the way that Phil carries himself throughout the film, it isn’t nearly as aggressive or overtly insecure or slick, and towards the end of both Caden’s life and the film, there’s a resolve and a tenderness he expresses in every little action he performs.

1. Lancaster Dodd, The Master

In my mind there was nothing else that could have topped this list, no other performance worthy of celebration than my guy Phil portraying Lancaster Dodd. It encompasses the things I love most about Hoffman and is accomplished flawlessly. In a review at the end of last year I made mention of Amy Adams performance in The Master and how criminally underrated she was in that performance and said maybe I’d make more time to talk about what it is I love about The Master. This isn’t the time to go all out, but I’ll take what I can get. Every performance in The Master is the best performance in its given category in 2012, and it’s criminal that Philip Seymour Hoffman lost in Best Supporting Actor. Maybe it says more about me that I’m transfixed upon Hoffman’s performance as a charismatic cult leader instead of Phoenix’s portrayal of a broken and disturbed veteran, but the way he holds the room and draws everyone around him into his orbit is phenomenal. I’m particularly taken with the scenes associated with processing and trying to help Freddie “get better”. These are the scenes that Dodd seems the most in control, repeating key phrases and questions over and over in order to elicit a response from Freddie, but what Hoffman is doing is using subtle changes in the cadence and tone of his voice to say so much more than a simple question like “are you a liar?” It’s in these scenes and especially the confrontation at the party that you can see the clear seams in the facade of The Cause. Lancaster Dodd is a man skilled in basic forms of hypnosis and emotional coercion, able to prey on the insecurities and fears of the post-war populous. Phil perfectly moves through these scenes, knowing what it is that these people want and “need” but when he is asked to explain or to prove how illnesses can be treated “trillions of years in the past”, the rage beneath boils to the surface in these outbursts. It is truly an achievement in acting and a performance that people will revisit the same way they would Orson Welles in The Third Man or Laurence Olivier in Henry V. Frankly, I think people will revisit all of his performances the same way they would Welles, Olivier, or Ingrid Bergman.

It’s worth mentioning that there’s a ton of performances that didn’t end up on my list, including his performance as Truman Capote that netted him his Oscar, but you’re perfectly capable of pursuing and seeing all of the films he’s in. Thanks for reading, I love you. See you next time.