Recently, I found my thoughts irritably returning, like a toe masochistically seeking out a tiny uncomfortable pebble in a shoe, to the spectacularly terrible Hunger Games prequel movie The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes – a truly forgettable piece of expired franchise content. A question nagged. Was there something that could have redeemed that dire film, even slightly?
Then I realised a big thing it lacked which its predecessors had: Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose desperately sad death 10 years ago at the age of 46 is still shocking to me. He played the creepy head gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee. It wasn’t his greatest role. It was clearly not much more than a paycheque. But through his presence, The Hunger Games raised their game.
Hoffman has been prominent on social media recently in the run-up to the 10th anniversary of his death. The potent memory of this actor is irresistible: so smart, funny, distinctive and so cruelly snatched away at the height of his powers. People have been sharing their favourite images of him online, often in minor or unusual roles. I think I would post a shot of him in Moneyball, playing the baseball manager Art Howe of the Oakland Athletics, part of the old-guard swept away by Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane and his newfangled stat-centred techniques.
Hoffman slouched and prowled in a shirt that unashamedly emphasised his spreading gut: he radiated discontent and hostility – the small role showed the classic Hoffman radioactivity, that aura of scepticism and scorn.
It was excellent work, but Hoffman never did any other kind. Although maybe he would have been better as Beane himself, playing him with the kind of radical outsider punch that he packed while playing music journalist Lester Bangs in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous in 2000.
Seymour was superb in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), playing the Hubbard-esque cult leader, and in Capote in 2005 (directed, like Moneyball, by Bennett Miller), for which he received the best actor Oscar for playing novelist Truman Capote. For the film, the big actor seemed to almost physically shrink to play a tiny, sprightly, birdlike figure. He was frightening as the haughty Freddie Miles in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and very frightening indeed as the guy addicted to making abusive phone calls in Todd Solondz’s Happiness in 1998. He probably achieved his masterpiece in Charlie Kaufman’s own masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York (2008), playing the morose playwright whose new immersive creation becomes its own giant reality.
Other performances come back into my mind: the grumpy brother opposite Laura Linney in The Savages in 2007 (a great pairing, actually), the siblings having to come together in middle age to deal with their elderly father. Or how about Love Liza from 2002, with Hoffman playing a man suffering a breakdown after the death of his wife – the script was written by the actor’s brother, Gordy Hoffman. The often wordless agony he showed in this intensely personal film feels very real.
This is just a fraction of Hoffman’s screen career and doesn’t touch on his stage work. But why is the thought of Hoffman so potent now? I think it’s because of a yearning to dispense with franchise dullness and return the movies, especially US films, to a tough, analogue reality, with human scripts and human characterisation. And Hoffman was the standard-bearer for these values without wanting to be, or seeing his career in those terms.
Think of the movies on the Academy Awards best picture list: in Killers of the Flower Moon, I love Robert De Niro as the malign farmsteader, but I can also picture Hoffman in the role. In Poor Things, I love Willem Dafoe’s doctor and Mark Ruffalo’s moustachioed bounder. But I can also see Hoffman playing either one. I can see Hoffman playing Leonard Bernstein. I can certainly see Hoffman playing one of the subordinate roles in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, for example Lewis Strauss. The presence of Hoffman is spectrally there for me, a counterfactual presence, in many of this year’s feted films. He was a brilliant, unique performer and an inspiration.
