Pointless inquiries arise: How did a guy like Hoffman know heroin dealers? Heroin was his drug of choice? Heroin?? There's nothing to be done now, but it's difficult not to ponder how his commitment to diving deep into a character's painful world didn't have an impact on his real emotional state. How it was a release for him, but left him so drained that a crutch seemed more and more appealing, even necessary. It's been written by people who knew him that he was unbearably hard on himself, researching and experimenting endlessly on his subject. That effort yielded astonishing results. Greatness just came with the package, it wasn't that you were disappointed when he wasn't great, because it never happened. Perhaps the spoils we received watching him and the mountainous standards we held for him felt invisible because he put all of it on his back. That the output of the art was always more important than the endurance needed to maintain the illusion of effortlessness. That generosity seeped through the screen.
I can't speak for his heralded stage work or Capote or Happiness or Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, but from what I have seen of his work, I can comfortably estimate that he was one of the most innately talented working screen actors, Daniel Day-Lewis and Joaquin Phoenix, and maybe Leonardo DiCaprio, are the other ones in his weight class. To say he had no vanity as a performer would be nonviable, because he didn't have a lot of vanity to flaunt. He was rotund, had a giant head, freckled skin that looked dried out by the sun, thin lips that stretched too far across his face, and a receding flop of hair that was chameleonic in its shades of fire-red, yellow, and white. His amorphous shape seemed to coincide with his flexibility as contributor to an entire puzzle, assuming whatever form was needed to fit. Often he would be a small piece, a one-and-done scene stealer, but his screen time in those pictures was disparate from the burn he sizzled in your memory. I think of his prah-per speaking Brandt nervously chuckling as The Dude gazes foggily at the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers portrait in The Big Lebowski, the spoiled silver-spooner Freddie calling out Ripley on his peeping in The Talented Mr. Ripley, the delusional former child star or anarchic villain of otherwise forgettable blockbusters Along Came Polly and Mission Impossible III, and his high-minded rock critic Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. His "uncool" speech in that film has been diluted by people who throw that quote around too much, and ironically, but not surprisingly, have never felt uncool themselves. But it speaks to Hoffman's delivery of those lines, he made being an unsocial, polarizing, loudmouth critic seem like a sympathetic, misunderstood intellectual. He made the uncool cool. You sense that Paul Thomas Anderson, who had Hoffman in five of his films, not only admired him but craved his inspiration on set to get his own creative juices flowing. Hoffman repeated lines in all of Anderson's movies ("fun, Fun, Fun!", "I'm a fucking idiot", "SHUT SHUT SHUT SHUT", "Say your name, say it again, say it again"), and those mantras seem now like Hoffman revving his engine, warming up his acting muscles, accelerating into higher and higher RPMs. A big theme of Anderson's films is family, and Hoffman was almost always the one you'd respond to like a family member. You want to send Scotty a mixtape of break-up songs when he gets rejected by Dirk in Boogie Nights, you want to set his saintly Phil Parma from Magnolia up on a date, you want to party with his obnoxious craps player from Hard Eight for a night like an estranged cousin and then not see him again for a couple years. In light of his death and the correlation of his stringent work ethic of giving everything to a performance, I suspect two of his lead roles in Synecdoche, New York and The Master will have the longest legs when looking back on his career years from now because they both are about the suffering that comes with being the creator of something, and I suspect people will not be able to watch them the same way now. Synecdoche reveals the endlessness of the process, how even when something's finished, the artist is never fully satisfied. The Master hits really close to home because it dives into how hard it is to keep up an act when you no longer believe the truth of it, and why substances (in the film, Joaquin Phoenix's paint thinner cocktail) are so dangerous because they make the job so much easier. Although the latter is one of the most gigantic, magnetizing performances of the past ten years, Hoffman seemed okay with being overshadowed by others in the ensemble. Two of the most underrated performances of recent times were Hoffman's in Moneyball and The Ides of March. Other performances were more celebrated in those films, but Hoffman's collaborative gift had a sizable effect on elevating his costars to the podium of public debate. It's no shock that this selflessness was why he was so adorned by his peers.
Selfishly, the first thought that crept into my mind Sunday was "Man, no more great Hoffman performances." Someone who does not conform to the movie-star life cycle, which he didn't, also can't be applicable to any age limit for expiration of watchability. As brilliant as he was, I'm surely not the only one to think the best was still to come from him. Still, the sadness I, and many others feel, about what could have been is entangled with tremendous gratitude of what he did leave us, and what he left us is magic. He mattered. And his art will never stop mattering.
-Rex
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