Skip to main content

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!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
3 comments
Read more

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...
15 comments
Read more

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".
1 comment
Read more