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Hoffman La Roche

The squint to your right belongs to man of the moment, Philip Seymour Hoffman, arguably the finest American actor of his generation.

He recently played Truman Capote, a darkly complex protagonist, for which he was awarded the best actor Oscar - in the process giving the world the first serious portrait of an intelligent gay writer - that is, a writer who just happens to be gay.

Hoffman's Capote may be bitchy and stylishly dressed (as many straight writers are) but he is, above all else, determined and envious and talented - and that uncomfortable true-to-life brew is never left to boil over in scenes of camp. My favourite part of Capote was the Nancy Drew-Hardy Boy relationship between him and the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, as they visit small town America with sophisticated Manhattan mores. A TV series could be spun from just such a collision of glamour and cornpone-crime. Perhaps an adaptation of Capote's true-crime novella, about handcarved coffins, from Music For Chameleons, could be developed along such lines.

Now PSH is back, as quasi-Bond villain Owen Davian, in Tom Cruise's latest Mission Impossible. I thought MI-3 was very good, for an actioner, and milked the tension between becoming a husband and being a US operative with emotional intelligence; also, several of the key scenes, including a scarifying interrogation aboard a jet, and Cruise silenced by a rubber mouth-mask eerily reminiscent of Lecter's (and American foreign policy in Iraq and Guantanamo) were well-designed.

Hoffman's Davian isn't really a great portrait of onscreen evil - unlike John Malkovich's Oscar-winning assassin in In The Line of Fire you never feel the thespian beneath the skin given full reign to explore the method in the madness. However, Hoffman does make Davian that curious thing - an American villain who actually represents what most people in the world don't like about Americans: bloated, unusually strong, entirely disinterested in human concern, affectless-but-bloodthirsty and mega-rich. Is "Davian" some kind of admixture of "Damien", "Camp David" and "Branch Davidian"?

Davian's expressionless disdain as he is coptered imperiously away from a smashed bridge and presumably dead Impossible Missions team is impressive. It's like the flight from Saigon, but this time you know there'll be a return. It's good seeing Hoffman punch Cruise in Shanghai, though he was far more disturbing (and disturbed) in Punch-Drunk Love.

Viva Hoffman!

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