Freddie Miles in “The Talented Mr Ripley” (1999)
One key role that showed the immensity of Hoffman’s range in the early-ascent period of his career was this supporting turn in Anthony Minghella’s version of Patricia Highsmith’s golden, sun-soaked tale of mimicry and Mediterranean murder. Hoffman had already proven time and again a facility for imbuing even highly unlikable characters with a streak of genuine pathos, that allowed us to glimpse, and even sympathize with, the sad, craven human within. But Freddie Miles is in a totally different register—an arrogant, classist snob who may be absolutely correct in his suspicions about Ripley (Matt Damon), but with whom it’s pretty much vital that we do not sympathize, in order for the film to work as well as it does. And Hoffman fits this seemingly atypical role like a glove, bringing an edge of sneering supercilious malice to all of Freddie’s dealings with Ripley that puts us in Ripley’s corner, right up to the point of murder. Freddie’s to-the-manner-born air of entitlement and wealth, the casual cruelty that informs his sharp assessment of the apartment in which Ripley is pretending to be Dickie Greenleaf as “so bourgeois,” the lazy, reptilian way he commands the room with his air of insouciant privilege—he is a detestable creature, but a frighteningly believable one. And his arrogance is also his own fatal flaw: he may have scraped at Ripley’s dark secret, but his ego somehow won’t let him believe that he could possibly be in any real danger from so pathetic and unworthy a creature. All of this Hoffman gives us in a just a few scenes, but they are crucial to the film’s greatest sleight of hand: maneuvering the audience into the position of rooting for a murderer.
Lancaster Dodd in “The Master” (2012)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s evolution toward an almost Kubrickian mastery of the craft of filmmaking continues with each new film, and his most recent was no exception. Hoffman, who’d been cast in every PTA feature film bar “There Will Be Blood” got his most pivotal role yet for the director with this magnificent portrait of hubris, self-deception and manipulation. And as Lancaster Dodd, an L. Ron Hubbard-esque founder of a faith system known as “The Cause” Hoffman gave a performance so titanic that in retrospect it feels like, of his final performances, the most fitting grace note to a remarkable career. But Anderson uses Hoffman with restraint, focussing on Joaquin Phoenix’s volatile, nervy Freddie Quell for most of the film and only really squarely gazing at Dodd on rare occasions, and that lends those scenes an even more mesmerizing quality as a result. Hoffman is everything in this role: bombastic and enormous and craven and small. And, surrounded by acolytes and lost souls desperate for any shred of redemption, it seems like even he no longer knows when he is fabricating and when he is not. This streak of doubt and fear, hinted at so subtly by Hoffman, separates out his Dodd from Anderson’s last towering leading man, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in “There Will Be Blood.” In contrast to the Herman Melville-style grandiosity of that character, Hoffman’s Dodd is almost effete, and yet the effect that he can have on those around him is no less corrosive, no less dangerous. Is Dodd a monster? It’s a question we just can’t answer given Hoffman’s tremendous depth in the role—can anyone be a monster if they are so self-deceived as to actually believe their own advertising? Less a fabulist and a con man than a peddler of the narcotic comfort of certainty and faith who somewhere along the way started to get high on his own supply, Dodd’s may not be the biggest role in “The Master,” but he is the planet around which the entire, enormous film orbits. And it’s utterly impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. As a treat tinged with tragedy twice over, here’s the blistering confrontation scene from the film that plays out largely as a two-hander between Hoffman and the also now sadly deceased Christopher Evan Welch.
Honorable Mentions
It won’t surprise anyone to hear that our first version of this list was 20 films long, with about that number again of honorable mentions; in the vast majority of his output it feels like Hoffman delivered something special, even when the films were not so memorable. The roles of his that were the most difficult for us to exclude were: Andy in Sidney Lumet’s final film, crime thriller-cum-morality play “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”; Dan Mahowny in the underseen gambling addiction drama “Owning Mahowny”; Dean Trumbull in “Punch Drunk Love” (though we did feel that 3 PTA entries was probably sufficient); Jacob Elinsky in Spike Lee’s excellent “25th Hour”; ornery screenwriter Joseph Turner White in David Mamet’s fun and funny “State and Main”; Jon Savage in the solid indie “The Savages”; Rusty the pre-op transgender woman tasked with caring for a stroke-afflicted homophobicRobert de Niro in Joel Schumacher’s “Flawless”; and while purely for its negligible screen time we couldn’t really consider it for the main list, he’s absolutely hilarious and oddly poignant as the obsequious assistant Brandt in the Coens’ “The Big Lebowski.”
More recently, he injected some life into the turgid, downbeat “God’s Pocket” as low-level hood Mickey Scarpato, was reliably sensitive and soulful as Robert Gelbart in the otherwise soapy and unconvincing “A Late Quartet,” and his turn as Gunter Bachman in Anton Corbijn’s “A Most Wanted Man” was one we singled out for praise in a slightly disappointing film overall.
And even beyond that there’s a lot that’s worth another look: he did sterling voiceover work on the great and little-seen animation “Mary and Max”; he was great as Charlie Mayne in TV two-parter “Empire Falls“; he popped up in memorable supporting turns in everything from “The Boat that Rocked,” “Red Dragon,” “Cold Mountain,” and “The Ides of Match,” to a great little role as Art Howe in “Moneyball.” His performance in his own sole directorial outing “Jack Goes Boating” is also a gently observed treat, while his forays into big studio tentpoles are also due a mention: he did his best to make an underwritten and anticlimactically dispatched villain in “Mission: Impossible 3” into something worth watching; was amiably rag-tag as one of the tornado chasers in “Twister” and most recently, of course, took the role of Plutarch Heavensbee in the “Hunger Games” franchise. It’s in that role, in “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2” that we’ll see the last of Hoffman on our screens, and if that seems a slightly ignoble way to cap a dazzling career, it still cannot take away from an extraordinary legacy.
In fact, compiling this list, and exploring his near-unprecedented hit rate has brought it home to us again in full force, just how much we lost when we lost Philip Seymour Hoffman in February. But also, of course, just what a wealth of great films and great performances he left behind. Rest in peace, and thank you.
