Maybe it was when he and John C. Reilly burned up the stage at the Circle in the Square in the 2000 revival of Sam Shepard’s “True West.” Or possibly it was even earlier, in the wrenching telephone scene in “Magnolia,” the disturbing telephone scenes in “Happiness,” the sad self-loathing of “Boogie Nights” or the smug self-possession of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” that brought the news of his unique mixture of talent, discipline and fearlessness.
Further evidence just isn't challenging to get. Mr. Hoffman worked a whole lot more than the past 15 years or so — in ambitious independent movies, Hollywood blockbusters and theater productions on and beyond Broadway — and just about generally did some thing memorable. (If you bear in mind anything concerning the 2004 romantic comedy “Along Came Polly,” as an example, it truly is most likely to be Mr. Hoffman’s terrible basketball abilities along with the equally dubious romantic suggestions he provides to Ben Stiller in that film.)
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 maintain the list at a manageable half-dozen for these days) had been distinguished by how far he was willing to go into the souls of flawed, even detestable characters. As the heavy, the weird friend or the volatile co-worker in a massive commercial movie he could possibly deliver not merely comic relief yet too the particular pleasure that comes from encountering an actor who takes his art definitely regardless of the project. He could possibly have specialized in unhappiness, still you had been continually glad to see him.
Mr. Hoffman’s gifts had been widely celebrated even though he was alive. But the shock of his death on Sunday revealed, at the same time soon and too late, the astonishing scale of his greatness plus the solidity of his achievement. We didn't lose just a superb actor. We may well have lost the most effective 1 we had. He was only 46, and his death, apparently from a drug overdose, foreshortened a career that was already monumental.
We is often denied his Lear, his Prospero, his James Tyrone in a further “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” (He was the son Jamie in a 2003 production of that play.) But he had already, in the last couple of years, begun to shift from troubled adults to tragic patriarchs. His Willy Loman at 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 to have, conveyed with force and delicacy sufficient each to supply the play’s message and to overcome its sentimentality.
What he did in “The Master,” his fifth film using the writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, was even grander. It might possibly take the globe a while to catch up with that journey into dark, uncharted zones of the American character, having said that as soon as it does it'll get, in Lancaster Dodd, an archetype of corrupted idealism, entrepreneurial zeal and authentic spiritual insight.
But too, as that character likes to say, with ostentatious modesty, of himself: basically a man. Dodd is flesh and blood, appetite and imagination, a specifically rendered creature of his location and time. Mr. Hoffman’s diction, his barreling physicality, his displays of Rotarian jollity and earnest intellectualism decide Dodd as an exemplary (if eccentric) postwar American, an expression of the identical curious cultural ferment that developed Willy Loman.
Of course “The Master” is soon after some thing alot more than reimagined history. Like Dodd himself, it wants to penetrate the perennial mysteries of the human personality, one specimen at a time. Dodd is actually a healer, a con artist as well as a self-proclaimed prophet. He is at the same time, perhaps above all, an actor: a performer, an impromptu singer and stand-up comedian, a man having a Method. He calls it the Cause, then again his technique of psychological exploration, according to the excavation of memory along with the opening up of barricaded emotional territory, shows clear affinities with the procedure a great many stage and screen actors use to acquire their way into a character.
Mr. Hoffman’s way — not necessarily affiliated with any particular school or ideology, and above all the item of his own restless intelligence and relentless drive — took him further and deeper than a number of of his colleagues could be willing to venture.
Lancaster Dodd may perhaps have been a familiar type: a charming, slippery, charlatan. Mr. Hoffman produced him significantly more than that. One of his earliest scenes is an interview — component therapy, component interrogation — with Freddie Quell, a disturbed veteran played by Joaquin Phoenix. The unmistakable rumble of Mr. Hoffman’s voice conveys each sadism and compassion: Dodd’s simultaneous urges to assist, to seduce and to dominate his new protégé. Later, when Dodd makes a toast at his daughter’s wedding banquet, we see each his arrogance and his insecurity, and catch a flicker of the loneliness that feeds his insatiable and destructive hunger for adore.
Dodd at as soon as invites our judgment — he does terrible factors in the service of questionable ends — even as Mr. Hoffman compels our admiration. His aim seemed to be not merely the psychological reality that has long been the baseline criterion of post-Method acting, on the other hand a moral uncertainty that remains at the same time fraught and frightening for many of us, in art or in life, to engage.
This just isn't basically a matter of seeking out gray places or mapping ambiguities. Hoffman’s characters exist, additional generally 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 buddies in pursuit of his literary ambitions, his motives a volatile mixture of compassion and morbid curiosity. The schoolteacher in “25th Hour” along with the lonely predator in “Happiness” are each indelibly creepy. The frustrated academic of “The Savages” is merely (if too splendidly) misanthropic, as well as the grumpy theater artist of “Synecdoche, New York” is usually merely (if at the same time baroquely) frustrated. The priest of “Doubt” along with the would-be criminal of “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” are potentially a lot worse.
These are not antiheroes in the cable tv, charismatic poor-boy sense of the term. They are, in a great deal of circumstances (and you can find alot more, going all of the way back to “The Talented Mr. Ripley” as well as the 1992 “Scent of a Woman”), thoroughly awful people: pathetic, repellent, undeserving of sympathy. Mr. Hoffman rescued them from contempt precisely by refusing any easy route to redemption.
He didn't care if we liked any of these sad specimens. The point was to make us feel them and to comprehend in them — in him — a reality about ourselves that we could otherwise have preferred to stay away from. He had a uncommon capacity to illuminate the kinds of human ugliness. No one ever did it so beautifully.
