It was clear, at least since he won the Oscar in 2006 for Capote, that Philip Seymour Hoffman was an unusually fine actor. Really though, it was clear long before that, depending on when and where you started paying attention.
Maybe it was when he and John C Reilly burned up the stage at the Circle in the 2000 revival of Sam Shepard's True West. Or maybe it was even earlier, in the wrenching telephone scene in Magnolia, the disturbing scenes in Happiness, the sad self-loathing of Boogie Nights or the smug self-possession of The Talented Mr. Ripley that brought out his special combination of talent and fearlessness.
Further evidence is not hard to find. Hoffman worked a lot over the past 15 years or so - in ambitious independent movies, Hollywood blockbusters and theatre productions on and beyond Broadway - and nearly always did something memorable.
His dramatic roles in middle-sized movies (Capote, 25th Hour, Doubt, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, The Savages and Synecdoche, New York, to keep the list at a manageable half-dozen for now) were distinguished by how far he was willing to go into the souls of flawed, even detestable characters. As the heavy, weird friend or the volatile co-worker in a big commercial movie he could offer not only comic relief but also the specific pleasure that comes from encountering an actor who takes his art seriously no matter the project.
Hoffman's gifts were widely celebrated while he was alive. But the shock of his death on Sunday revealed, too soon and too late, the astonishing scale of his greatness and the solidity of his achievement. We did not lose just a very good actor. We may have lost the best one we had. He was only 46, and his death, apparently from a drug overdose, foreshortened a career that was already monumental.
He had already, in the last few years, begun to shift from troubled adults to tragic patriarchs. His Willy Loman in the 2012 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman was a scalding, operatic depiction of vanity, self-delusion and raw emotional need, conveyed with force and delicacy sufficient both to deliver the play's message and to overcome its sentimentality.
What he did in The Master, his fifth film with the writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, was even grander. It may take the world a while to catch up with that journey into dark, uncharted zones of the American character, but once it does it will discover, in Lancaster Dodd, an archetype of corrupted idealism, entrepreneurial zeal and authentic spiritual insight.
Hoffman's way - not necessarily affiliated with any particular school or ideology, and above all the product of his own restless intelligence and relentless drive - took him deeper than most of his colleagues would be willing to venture.
His goal seemed to be not just the psychological truth that has long been the baseline criterion of post-Method acting, but a moral uncertainty that remains too fraught and frightening for many of us, in art or in life, to engage.
This is not just a matter of seeking out gray areas or mapping ambiguities. Hoffman's characters exist, more often than not, in a state of ethical and existential torment. They are stuck on the battleground where pride and conscience contend with base and ugly instincts.
Lancaster Dodd sacrifices his intelligence on the altar of his ego. Truman Capote risks his integrity and betrays his friends in pursuit of his literary ambitions, his motives a mixture of compassion and morbid curiosity. The schoolteacher in 25th Hour and the lonely predator in Happiness are both indelibly creepy. The priest of Doubt and the would-be criminal of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead are potentially much worse.
These are not antiheroes in the cable television, charismatic bad-boy sense of the term. They are, in many cases thoroughly awful people: pathetic, repellent, undeserving of sympathy. Hoffman rescued them from contempt precisely by refusing any easy route to redemption.
He did not care if we liked any of these sad specimens. The point was to make us believe them and to recognise in them - in him - a truth about ourselves that we might otherwise have preferred to avoid. He had a rare ability to illuminate the varieties of human ugliness. No one ever did it so beautifully.
Maybe it was when he and John C Reilly burned up the stage at the Circle in the 2000 revival of Sam Shepard's True West. Or maybe it was even earlier, in the wrenching telephone scene in Magnolia, the disturbing scenes in Happiness, the sad self-loathing of Boogie Nights or the smug self-possession of The Talented Mr. Ripley that brought out his special combination of talent and fearlessness.
Further evidence is not hard to find. Hoffman worked a lot over the past 15 years or so - in ambitious independent movies, Hollywood blockbusters and theatre productions on and beyond Broadway - and nearly always did something memorable.
His dramatic roles in middle-sized movies (Capote, 25th Hour, Doubt, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, The Savages and Synecdoche, New York, to keep the list at a manageable half-dozen for now) were distinguished by how far he was willing to go into the souls of flawed, even detestable characters. As the heavy, weird friend or the volatile co-worker in a big commercial movie he could offer not only comic relief but also the specific pleasure that comes from encountering an actor who takes his art seriously no matter the project.
Hoffman's gifts were widely celebrated while he was alive. But the shock of his death on Sunday revealed, too soon and too late, the astonishing scale of his greatness and the solidity of his achievement. We did not lose just a very good actor. We may have lost the best one we had. He was only 46, and his death, apparently from a drug overdose, foreshortened a career that was already monumental.
He had already, in the last few years, begun to shift from troubled adults to tragic patriarchs. His Willy Loman in the 2012 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman was a scalding, operatic depiction of vanity, self-delusion and raw emotional need, conveyed with force and delicacy sufficient both to deliver the play's message and to overcome its sentimentality.
What he did in The Master, his fifth film with the writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, was even grander. It may take the world a while to catch up with that journey into dark, uncharted zones of the American character, but once it does it will discover, in Lancaster Dodd, an archetype of corrupted idealism, entrepreneurial zeal and authentic spiritual insight.
Hoffman's way - not necessarily affiliated with any particular school or ideology, and above all the product of his own restless intelligence and relentless drive - took him deeper than most of his colleagues would be willing to venture.
His goal seemed to be not just the psychological truth that has long been the baseline criterion of post-Method acting, but a moral uncertainty that remains too fraught and frightening for many of us, in art or in life, to engage.
This is not just a matter of seeking out gray areas or mapping ambiguities. Hoffman's characters exist, more often than not, in a state of ethical and existential torment. They are stuck on the battleground where pride and conscience contend with base and ugly instincts.
Lancaster Dodd sacrifices his intelligence on the altar of his ego. Truman Capote risks his integrity and betrays his friends in pursuit of his literary ambitions, his motives a mixture of compassion and morbid curiosity. The schoolteacher in 25th Hour and the lonely predator in Happiness are both indelibly creepy. The priest of Doubt and the would-be criminal of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead are potentially much worse.
These are not antiheroes in the cable television, charismatic bad-boy sense of the term. They are, in many cases thoroughly awful people: pathetic, repellent, undeserving of sympathy. Hoffman rescued them from contempt precisely by refusing any easy route to redemption.
He did not care if we liked any of these sad specimens. The point was to make us believe them and to recognise in them - in him - a truth about ourselves that we might otherwise have preferred to avoid. He had a rare ability to illuminate the varieties of human ugliness. No one ever did it so beautifully.
©2014 The New York Times