It Should Take A Better War
I remember studying the Revolutionary War with bated breath in elementary school. I loved reading about the battles in places that I knew, loved learning about troop movements and the conditions that precipitated a battle. But what I loved most was reading excerpts of letters, messages from soldiers home, responses from home to the front, supply lists, ordinary thingsscr atched from a feather tip. So when we started watching Liberty! the seemingly never-ending documentary about the Revolution on PBS in class, I was in heaven. Historians were interspersed with actors reading excerpts from documents. The cast list is actually pretty impressive: I remember a dignified Benjamin Franklin (Philip Boscoe), a dreamy Thomas Jefferson (Campbell Scott), a fiery Thomas Paine (Roger Rees), but it was the nobodies I really liked, particularly Philip Seymour Hoffman.
He was Joseph Plumb Martin, a solider from Massachusetts who left a journal, A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Danger and Suffering of a Revolutionary Soldier
published around 1830. It was republished in the 1960s under the snappier title
Private Yankee Doodle.
PSH breathes vitality into these words, making them instantly relate-able across the centuries. He's conversational, at ease, just a dude talking about being bored, enlisting and finding strange Americans along the way. We're right there with him, understanding him, feeling him, which is ultimately an actor's purest aim:
suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. -Hamlet 3.2
Shakespeare aside, this was what PSH did. He contained multitudes, to quote Uncle Walt. But somehow, he never overdid it. Even in Capote, even in The Master, these characters are real. And his ability to connect, to reflect across the void, across the fourth wall, or the fourth mile in a move theater, was incredible. It grabbed you, shook the dust off you, and looked you in the eyes, even if it was maniacal. Especially if it was maniacal. We see ourselves.
Over the 16 years that I've been watching him, from the second he appears on screen, I’m always holding my breath, waiting to see what exquisite anguish he’ll share, what mundane-ity he’ll render profound. What he did, what he could do, makes me feel good about being alive. If there are people thinking so much, putting this much effort into portraying ordinary (and therefore transcendent) life, it's all worth it. I wish we could have reflected that back to him, showed him how much light be brought into the world. Maybe he was unable to see it, despite being so glaringly perceptive. What a loss.
Emma Impink appreciates finding IGGY POP in the stacks and this.