His work is quite personal to me. Hoffman grew up only thirty minutes from where I did, and as such, I always there was a connection between us, some kind of small but significant reason to be proud of his talent and his success, despite the fact that I had nothing at all to do with it. His work in film intrigued and impressed me, especially the films he made with Paul Thomas Anderson and Charlie Kaufman's very special film Synecdoche, New York. I also had the distinct pleasure of watching Hoffman as Willy Loman in the 2012 revival of Death of a Salesman. It was the first time I had seen a play on Broadway, and Hoffman was masterful. He was able to imbue his performance with a beautifully haggard dignity that lived subtly beneath the surface of Loman's quiet desperation.
A few months after watching him on stage, I watched him perform exuberantly in The Master, playing what could have, in the hands of another man, become a calculated, coldly cerebral character. Instead, Hoffman gave us a manipulative master whose insecurities and weaknesses he allows us to glimpse as the fuel behind Lancaster Dodd's megalomania. As he twists his sheep-followers with pseudoscience, supreme confidence, and fatherly condescension, we are allowed to see that there is something poisonous within him, something soft and vulnerable that he refuses to allow to be exploited. In The Master, Hoffman clearly understood the inner workings of not only Lancaster Dodd but of all human beings, an understanding which he was able to bring to very much of his work.
My personal favorite performance of his comes in the 2008 film Synecdoche, New York, which is quite honestly the most complex and the most terrifying movie I have ever seen. Here, he gives us a fucking mess of a person with a fucking mess of a life, who, when tasked with using the money from a MacArthur Fellowship to write a play that he wants to be truth itself, begins to restructure and manipulate his own life as inspiration. It is a daring meditation on life and death, on what means to die, and on what exactly reality is. This movie came to me at a time when I was unsure about a great deal of things, and Hoffman's Caden Cotard allowed me to come to terms with that uncertainty, to cry and to breathe and to think deeply about my own life, what it meant, and what it could mean. That is really the power of Philip Seymour Hoffman at his best. With his acting, he was able to push you so far off the deep end that you weren't even sure that you had fallen. And then, just when you thought you might be drowning. he allowed you to surface, a mess of adrenaline and thought and more clarity than you would have ever conceded on your own.
It is for this, the power of his performances, that we must remember him. It is not our perogative to judge him, to moralize, to condemn, to turn his life and his work into some kind of perverted cautionary tale. Hoffman was a great artist struggling with something, as all artists do; indeed, as all men do. We must remember him the man who created Lancaster Dodd and Scotty J, who embodied Truman Capote, who reinvented Willy Loman, who brought a heartbreakingly heavy sense of human flaw and vulnerability to every role that he played. Let Hoffman live in the memory of ages as a beautiful artist whose talent will transcend his ephemeral life.
Philip Seymour Hoffman did not speak this monologue from Synecdoche, New York, but his character listens to it. I think this speech stands as an appropriate memorial to Hoffman's exceptional genius. Thank you, Mr. Hoffman.
"Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen."
