It was a shocking moment, one of those things you see on Twitter and hope it's fake but are oddly sure that it isn't. "Breaking: Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman found dead in Manhattan apartment." Soon the confirmation came: a short story at the Wall Street Journal and a bit more context from the Post (heroin claims another) and a bit more context from the Daily News and suddenly the TV is on and his neighbors are talking about how great he was with his kids and clips are playing from his body of work and he's gone.
How to recognize his life? For many of us yesterday YouTube was an invaluable resource, allowing us to quickly punch up our favorite clip. Here's what I went with (NSFW for language):
Punch-Drunk Love isn't his most memorable performance or the one that granted him the greatest screen time or the one on which he was asked to do the heaviest lifting. But there's something perfect about that clip: the way he modulates from threatening reasonableness to vocal hostility in zero seconds flat. The little hand shake he does with the handset at 1:23 or so, a physical manifestation of the rage he's trying to suppress. The "shut-shut-shut-shut up" repetition. The manic energy. It's just great.
Every movie he's in has a scene like that. Not exactly like that, of course. But a scene that dominates the rest of the film, one that jumps out at you and reminds you "Oh, yeah, he's arguably the best actor on the planet and certainly one of the two or three best to emerge in the last 20 years." You can almost go year by year and pick out such a scene: the hangdog look on Scotty's face after Dirk Diggler rejects his advances (1997, Boogie Nights); Brandt's discomfort with The Dude touching the wealthier Lebowski's plaques (1998, The Big Lebowski); Phil tracking down Frank Mackey on the phone (1999, Magnolia); Lester Bangs explaining journalism to a kid who has no idea what he's getting himself into or Lester Bangs explaining how coolness is like a drug or Lester Bangs telling his protege how to scam Rolling Stone's editors into giving him more time (2000, Almost Famous). You could go on and on like this, year after year.
Knowing what we now know about Hoffman's struggle with drugs—he was, apparently, an addict for several years before cleaning up for 20 years before slipping up last year before dying yesterday—one can't help but look at my favorite films of his, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, in a slightly different light. In it, a man is driven to embezzle from his employer and involve his brother in a jewelry robbery in order to pay for his drug habit. His compulsion gets the best of him, turning him into a monster. Hoffman's performance leapt out at me when I first saw it in 2007 but it has a special resonance today. As with other artists, knowing something about their personal demons can help us better understand—and better appreciate and better appraise—their work.