A Journey That Risks The Dark
A truly exceptional performance is about ownership, that no one else could've played that role. This is certainly true in regards to the brilliance of Day-Lewis and the bulk of Pacino's work, but while Pacino has had his phone-ins worth replacing/skipping, and Day-Lewis wasn’t always uber-immersive—it took him 18 years to find his groove—there isn't a single role in Hoffman's oeuvre that could be substituted with any other performer. No one could play Scotty, Brandt, Rusty, Nurse Phil, Freddie Miles, Lester Bangs, Wilson Joel, Dan Mahowny, Sandy Lyle, Charlie Mayne, Truman Capote, Gust, Caden, Father Flynn, and Lancaster Dodd with the individual fervor and electricity with which Hoffman portrayed them. These performances will, thanks to the retrospect that often forcefully follows a lost life, be explored, revisited, and appreciated as representing something that I'm not sure we'll see in acting for a very long time: total, unconditional ownership.
I hesitate to say “loss of self” in place of “ownership”—though I played around with that thesis—because I’m not entirely sure that one could argue for a “loss of self” in most of Hoffman’s work. That is, Hoffman was an actor that worked to bring out what was dark, flawed, and ugly in his characters more than any other actor I have ever seen, because, as we unfortunately know now, those characteristics were self-reflexive. Most of us walk around everyday knowing exactly what malignities we carry, and Hoffman was no different. The difference is that we pursue the constant suppression and permanent eradication of our strongest ills and darkest secrets while this man’s work was devoted to keeping it all at the surface. A brutal task, but one more natural when you live as closely to your own darkness as he did. Because of this, Hoffman, it seems, never truly lost himself or “disappeared” into his performances, never method acting.
That darkness prevented PSH from presenting characters as bright or benign. His proprietorship, much like himself, wouldn’t, and probably couldn’t after all, bear the thought. But in terms of performance, in terms of his method, it seems to me that the center of Hoff’s process, his most gifted attribute, was what is found in the highest quality of ownership: Responsibility. It was more a matter of “doing right by the character” than transformation; that for x amount of time, all that matters is gutting the fish to find the meatiest flesh.
Unlike Day-Lewis, who is currently at a zenith of complete transformance, a changeling that somehow maneuvers himself in what seems like other skin completely, Hoffman was continually visible even in his deepest immersions. In Capote, for example, he bears an astounding physical resemblance to the man, yet still shows distance and performance without mimic. But this claim is delicate, because usually when you say that an actor is still “visible in a role,” you are intimating that they may not be in full control of the character or, worse, they may be “walking through” its movements. Hoffman, however, is able to completely captivate through total control, total possession, yet remind you that this is a craft of constant construction being worked on and not merely imitation.
I greatly enjoy Day-Lewis’s work, and early-to-mid DeNiro comes to mind with this, too, but I’m often less impressed with an actor that makes his craft about becoming the character 24/7 than an actor who is actively pursuing the character for the sake of the work; that it’s always about the work. PSH had the unique ability of easily, regardless of lead or ancillary positioning, taking over a movie, but not becoming the movie—Capote, again, is a masterful film that’s mastery is not just the anchor role, one of the best in American cinema, but the staggering excellence of each of its parts, which are all boldly on display. He could be the stunning, tour-de-force performer in 5mins that he could be in 55mins, but you never got the sense that it was ever about him, only about honoring the work and its creation. Hoffman took a character and opened him up as only he could’ve. He owned every single role in a way that was non-transferrable, utterly inconceivable by anyone else. I still don’t know how he pulled off a memorable performance as Art Howe. Trust a Met fan on that.
Ownership is everything in good acting, but true, deep, unequivocal conviction in the responsibility of a character without overkill, “over-acting,” is the rarest thing that few in American cinema have accomplished, even rarer for actors that gravitate to the type of self-reflexive material that Hoffman did. That was his gift. His characters were dark and deeply flawed, often addicts, as he was, yet he didn’t play them with a walk-through alongside a moving mirror, and he didn’t construct them, role-to-role, similarly. He built a powerhouse presentation of the writing and not of himself until the very end. For my money, he is the most memorable and skilled American film actor to have lived.
Pat Marino appreciates being home and being uncool.