I had originally planned to write about another topic this week (now scheduled for next week), when it occurred to me it’s been exactly ten years since the untimely death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Ten years of not being able to watch a new performance of his with awestruck eyes.
The first film I saw him in was The Talented Mr. Ripley, when it aired on TV in Finland in the summer of 2001. On that occasion, however, I didn’t really pay attention to any of the English-speaking actors (my main reason for watching the movie, after reading about it in the newspaper, was one of my favorite Italian TV hosts, comedian Rosario Fiorello, had a small role).
The first movie where I actually became aware of his presence, and made a mental note of keeping an eye out for future appearances, was Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (hence the picture I used for this post). He was quietly magnetic as the sadsack teacher, a performance less showy than Edward Norton’s but just as compelling.
He excelled as one of America’s greatest character actors, fearlessly throwing himself into roles that he made indelible even when the part itself was minuscule (his first of five collaborations with Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996’s Hard Eight, consisted of just one scene). Knowing he was not conventional movie star material – he openly acknowledged this in interviews – allowed him to lose all self-consciousness when approaching his characters.
Even when his career became increasingly mainstream (the result of having a large family to support, as his partner Mimi O’Donnell mentioned in a touching article about their 14 years together), he never took a part purely for the money, and always held himself to a very high standard when acting (“Doing the job isn’t difficult. Doing it well is difficult”, he once said).
To this day, his performance as Owen Davian in Mission: Impossible III remains the benchmark for that franchise’s villains (and not surprisingly, the film’s first trailer revolved largely around him). In the 2009 comedy The Boat That Rocked, he was a hilarious American counterpoint to the British ensemble assembled by director Richard Curtis. And while the work was ultimately incomplete, as he died before finishing all his scenes, he was one of the finer additions to the adult cast of the Hunger Games sequels (for the final film, his remaining lines were given to other characters, and other scenes where he would have appeared silently were rewritten to exclude his presence).
His last completed performance was in Anton Corbijn’sA Most Wanted Man, based on the novel of the same name by John Le Carré. The last movie he promoted in his lifetime (it premiered at Sundance mere days before his passing), I saw it a few months later, at the Zurich Film Festival. I remember writing at the time that the final scene – Hoffman screaming in anger as his plan doesn’t have the desired outcome – was exceptionally painful to watch knowing it was effectively his swansong. Ten years later, it still hurts to think about that sequence. Such was the raw power of the farewell performance of the finest American actor of his generation.