Paul Thomas Anderson was ahead of the curve with Philip Seymour Hoffman until the end
PTA used Hoffman's power from the sidelines until that power outlived the actor himself.
Photo: The Weinstein Company
With Together Again, Jesse Hassenger looks at actors and directors who have worked together on at least three films, analyzing the nature of their collaborations.
It wouldn’t be right to call Philip Seymour Hoffman a chameleon. Even before he became an Oscar winner and frequent player of first and second leads, Hoffman was a “that guy” character actor too distinctive to fully disappear into his roles. You don’t hire “that guy” for his mastery of disguise. Often, quite the opposite. Character actors take advantage of an unconscious sense of continuity: the idea that, say, the officious yet duplicitous prep-school prick from Scent Of A Woman could make sense as the humorless cop from Nobody’s Fool and the toady from The Big Lebowski. That the lovelorn porn-movie boom operator from Boogie Nights could also be the lonely obscene phone-caller in Happiness, or a wild tornado chaser from Twister might branch into a gregarious Lester Bangs in Almost Famous or an imitation Jack Black in Along Came Polly.
Those are three major modes of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and far from the only ones. It’s a tribute to his range and magnetism that they all seem like a natural fit without much superficial shapeshifting. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson didn’t completely avoid casting Hoffman in his various types across their five movies together. But he often seemed to stay a step or two ahead of the conventional wisdom around how to use one of his favorite actors—skipping, for example, over the early supercilious-prep phase entirely. This vein ran through some of Hoffman’s supporting work for years, well after he was done playing actual prep-schoolers, eventually turning into a kind of malicious inquisitiveness. His characters in Red Dragon (a journalist) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (mostly just nosy) aren’t the real bad guys, not compared to the murderers he side-eyes. But by virtue of identification with morally dubious characters, they’re naturally antagonistic.
Anderson cast Hoffman in antagonistic parts, too, but never especially witty ones. His characters are guys who don’t have the patience or the countenance to bother with insinuating. In Hard Eight, Anderson’s first feature, Hoffman is on screen for less than three minutes, playing an obnoxious gambler at the craps table with the older, quieter, more experienced Sydney (Philip Baker Hall). A mulleted Hoffman intones his repetitive taunts—he keeps calling Sydney “old-timer”—like a junior-level Nicolas Cage drawling through the kind of then-trendy Tarantino imitations that probably helped get Hard Eight a green light in the first place. He’s a walking, braying counterpoint to Hall’s stillness, as well as a calling card for a more expansive prickishness than Hoffman had shown in his Hollywood roles thus far.
Hoffman provides similar punctuation to Punch-Drunk Love—right down to sounding like Tarantino himself. (His orders repeatedly end with “All right? Okay?”) He isn’t on screen much more than he is during Hard Eight—maybe five minutes as opposed to three—but he looms more heavily over the proceedings as the would-be tormenter of Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), via a phone-sex-line scam. Barry lacks Sydney’s even keel, but his explosive bursts of rage are balanced by soft-spoken sweetness. Hoffman’s Dean Trumbell, better known as the Mattress Man, defaults to rage and disgust in seemingly any interaction, paradoxically opening his side of several conversations with “Shut up.”
Hoffman’s most famous moment in the movie is a variation on this: When Barry confronts him about his extortion on the phone, he unleashes a barrage of “Shut! Shut! Shut shut! Shut up!” When Barry confronts him in person and Dean backs down, he still can’t resist getting the last word in, screaming insults at Barry as he leaves, then immediately invoking Barry’s proposed “That’s that” like a kid on a playground frantically touching base during a game of tag. Anderson leaves the Mattress Man’s ultimate motivations—whatever feelings he has beneath his contemptuous impatience—unspoken and offscreen, which makes him a sleaze-world version of the villain Hoffman would play in Mission: Impossible III a few years later.
“Shut the fuck up” is also how Boogie Nights introduces Hoffman’s Scotty, though he’s on the receiving end of the admonishment as he awkwardly makes his side-door entrance at a debauched afternoon pool party. A porn-film crew worker wearing a series of snug tank tops, Scotty is a more sensitive character that anticipates the sexual awkwardness he’d be asked to maximize in Happiness a year later. One of the sweetest, if also most limiting, aspects of Boogie Nights is how Anderson draws so many of its characters as essentially childlike; earlier in the party sequence introducing Scotty, Dirk (Mark Wahlberg) and Reed (John C. Reilly) are comparing gym bona fides and swimming-pool pointers like a couple of 14-year-olds.
Hoffman’s Scotty fits perfectly into this schema, which is to say he doesn’t especially fit at all; he’s the kid at the class party, lingering on the sidelines, genially tolerated but unloved on a deeper level. In a movie that sometimes feels as if Anderson is doing the tracking-shot-introducing-all-the-characters bit on a loop, Scotty keeps unceremoniously appearing in the frame and popping up in the background; every time you wonder if Hoffman has quietly exited the picture during the characters’ ’80s-era downward slope, he pops up once more, sometimes with no more than a line or barely acknowledged reaction. Scotty’s story as it relates to the bigger picture—he’s in love with an oblivious Dirk, he acts on it, and gets rebuffed—is pretty much over with an hour of the movie to go. But he sticks around, and doesn’t meet the kind of end you might expect from the quiet tragedy of his unrequited love.
For an arrogant and reportedly drug-addled late-’90s enfant terrible, Anderson spared many of his early characters from the worst possible suffering. Like the Boogie Nights folks, the ensemble of Magnolia goes through a wringer, and one not so easily chalked up to the foolishness of youth or the allure of getting paid to have sex on camera. Yet only the absolute worst misdeeds seem likely to face great cosmic punishment. (Even then, an abuser’s attempted suicide is thwarted by the same strange falling-frogs fate that throws the rest of the cast off.) Amid this assembly of Anderson’s favorite actors, the filmmaker again zig-zags with Hoffman; having previously helped establish him as a jackass and then reshaped him as a socially awkward and emotionally needy type, he casts him here as Phil Parma, the home nurse caring for the dying Earl Partridge (Jason Robards). There’s a feint early on, when Phil orders a few groceries for delivery, then casually tacks on copies of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler; audiences could be forgiven for making an unconscious connection and wondering if Phil is meant to be some kind of creep. Yet, he turns out to be perhaps the most purely good person in Magnolia short of actual children. It may not be a coincidence that the character shares Hoffman’s first name.
