Dammit, dammit, dammit.
It’s no secret to any
regular reader of the cinecist that I consider Philip Seymour Hoffman to be
among the very best actors of his or any other generation. I was fortunate enough to see him onstage a
couple of times in iconic roles of the American theatre: Willie Loman in Death of a
Salesman and James Tyrone, Jr. in Long
Day’s Journey Into Night. He was, of course, excellent in both, and theatre
was at least as important as film to Hoffman the artist, and quite possibly
more so. But it’s onscreen that I will
feel his absence.
Hoffman wasn’t a great
transformer like Daniel Day-Lewis or Sean Penn; he always seemed to be playing more
or less some version of himself. But
within that self, as recognizable and specific as it was, he found colors of
human emotion and psychology that I’ve simply never seen onscreen in anyone else. He was committed to showing us something
absolutely raw and real and honest, especially when that something wasn’t
pretty to look at. He seemed almost perversely
drawn to roles that would allow him to be both physically and emotionally
unattractive. Because, I suspect, he
knew that what we are really attracted to, most of all, is truth. And truth is often not pretty. Even with his career cut so short (he was
only 46), I don’t think you will find any actor living or dead whose body of
work has brought more truth to the screen.
But even so...he had so much more truth left to bring, and we’ll never
see it.
Dammit.
A (very) abbreviated PSH filmography:
Boogie
Nights
Happiness
Flawless
Magnolia
25th
Hour
Owning Mahowny
Capote
The
Savages
Before
the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Synecdoche,
New York
Doubt
The
Master
© 2014 dondi demarco