{"id":169737,"date":"2025-09-26T05:55:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T05:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/169737\/"},"modified":"2025-09-26T05:55:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T05:55:12","slug":"paul-thomas-anderson-philip-seymour-hoffman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/169737\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Thomas Anderson, Philip Seymour Hoffman"},"content":{"rendered":"

With\u00a0Together Again<\/a>, Jesse Hassenger looks at actors and directors who have worked together on at least three films, analyzing the nature of their collaborations.<\/p>\n

It wouldn\u2019t 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 \u201cthat guy\u201d character actor too distinctive to fully disappear into his roles. You don\u2019t hire \u201cthat guy\u201d 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\u2019s Fool and the toady from The Big Lebowski. That the lovelorn porn-movie boom operator from Boogie Nights<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Those are three major modes of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and far from the only ones. It\u2019s 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\u2019t completely avoid casting Hoffman in his various types across their five movies together<\/a>. But he often seemed to stay a step or two ahead of the conventional wisdom around how to use one of his favorite actors\u2014skipping, for example, over the early supercilious-prep phase entirely. This vein ran through some of Hoffman\u2019s 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\u2019t the real bad guys, not compared to the murderers he side-eyes. But by virtue of identification with morally dubious characters, they\u2019re naturally antagonistic.<\/p>\n

Anderson cast Hoffman in antagonistic parts, too, but never especially witty ones. His characters are guys who don\u2019t have the patience or the countenance to bother with insinuating. In Hard Eight<\/a>, Anderson\u2019s first feature, Hoffman is on screen for less than three minutes<\/a>, 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\u2014he keeps calling Sydney \u201cold-timer\u201d\u2014like 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\u2019s a walking, braying counterpoint to Hall\u2019s stillness, as well as a calling card for a more expansive prickishness than Hoffman had shown in his Hollywood roles thus far.<\/p>\n

Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock vow to work together again before they die<\/a>Ethan Coen seems confident that he and his brother will someday work together again<\/a><\/p>\n

Hoffman provides similar punctuation to Punch-Drunk Love<\/a>\u2014right down to sounding like Tarantino himself. (His orders repeatedly end with \u201cAll right? Okay?\u201d) He isn\u2019t on screen much more than he is during Hard Eight\u2014maybe five minutes as opposed to three\u2014but 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\u2019s even keel, but his explosive bursts of rage are balanced by soft-spoken sweetness. Hoffman\u2019s 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 \u201cShut up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hoffman\u2019s 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 \u201cShut! Shut! Shut shut! Shut up!\u201d When Barry confronts him in person and Dean backs down, he still can\u2019t resist getting the last word in, screaming insults at Barry as he leaves, then immediately invoking Barry\u2019s proposed \u201cThat\u2019s that\u201d like a kid on a playground frantically touching base during a game of tag. Anderson leaves the Mattress Man\u2019s ultimate motivations\u2014whatever feelings he has beneath his contemptuous impatience\u2014unspoken and offscreen, which makes him a sleaze-world version of the villain Hoffman would play in Mission: Impossible III a few years later.<\/p>\n

\u201cShut the fuck up\u201d is also how Boogie Nights introduces Hoffman\u2019s Scotty, though he\u2019s 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\u2019d be asked to maximize in Happiness<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Hoffman\u2019s Scotty fits perfectly into this schema, which is to say he doesn\u2019t especially fit at all; he\u2019s 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\u2019 \u201980s-era downward slope, he pops up once more, sometimes with no more than a line or barely acknowledged reaction. Scotty\u2019s story as it relates to the bigger picture\u2014he\u2019s in love with an oblivious Dirk, he acts on it, and gets rebuffed\u2014is pretty much over with an hour of the movie to go. But he sticks around, and doesn\u2019t meet the kind of end you might expect from the quiet tragedy of his unrequited love.<\/p>\n

For an arrogant and reportedly drug-addled late-\u201990s enfant terrible, Anderson spared many of his early characters from the worst possible suffering. Like the Boogie Nights folks, the ensemble of Magnolia<\/a> 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\u2019s attempted suicide is thwarted by the same strange falling-frogs fate that throws the rest of the cast off.) Amid this assembly of Anderson\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s first name.<\/p>\n

Though unalike in presentation and temperament, Phil Parma isn\u2019t so different from Scotty in function: He stays on the sidelines. That position gives him more to do this time, just as most of the characters in Magnolia are more multifaceted than their Boogie Nights counterparts. As Earl\u2019s nurse, witness to his decline, Phil has greater empathy for the man than someone who\u2019s spent decades with him (or estranged from him), though he seems more than faintly aware of how difficult the old bastard can be. When Earl feebly asks to get in touch with his son Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), Phil reaches out on his behalf and makes it happen. He\u2019s the one major character in the movie whose personal problems don\u2019t really enter the narrative, serving as the audience for Earl\u2019s big, rambling monologue about regret as well as Frank\u2019s bedside breakdown over his absentee father.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a monologue-heavy movie, Anderson trusts Hoffman with a mini-monologue<\/a> that lampshades Magnolia\u2018s go-for-broke melodrama, pleading with a sales rep on the phone to connect him with someone who can get in touch with Mackey. Phone to his ear, touching his hand to his face in that now-familiar Hoffman way, he says:<\/p>\n

\u201cI know this sounds silly. And I know that I might sound ridiculous, like this is the scene in the movie where the guy\u2019s trying to get ahold of the long-lost son, you know, but this is that scene. This is that scene. And I think they have those scenes in movies because they\u2019re true. You know, because they really happen. And you gotta believe me, this is really happening. I mean, I can give you my number, and you can go check with whoever you gotta check with, and call me back. But do not leave me hanging on this. All right, please. See\u2026see, this is the scene of the movie where you help me out.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one of the most impressive casts of its era, it\u2019s difficult to picture anyone else in the ensemble making that dialogue work. Maybe that emotional rawness helps explain why Hoffman only has a small part in Punch-Drunk Love, and nothing in There Will Be Blood; Anderson\u2019s work was becoming a bit more obtuse during a period where Hoffman (thanks in part to Anderson) was more frequently and traditionally ingratiating. Magnolia, State And Main, and Almost Famous came out in a row, forming a versatile trilogy of disarmingly lovable Hoffman.<\/p>\n

Then, after a decade apart, during which Hoffman won an Oscar for his standard biopic transformation in Capote<\/a> and Anderson directed Daniel Day-Lewis to another Oscar for There Will Be Blood, Anderson and Hoffman came full circle with The Master<\/a>\u2014sort of. As in Hard Eight, Hoffman antagonizes the lead character, this time as the older man of greater (if self-styled) authority set against a younger, wilder man. (The actual age difference between the lead actors is only seven years; it\u2019s made to feel like more.) But Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman) isn\u2019t exactly the villain of The Master, any more than Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) registers as a hero. The movie\u2019s point of view sticks mostly with Quell\u2014including several scenes that seem like hallucinations or dreams, most notably when he sees Dodd singing to a room full of women who are suddenly all unclothed. This is not happening in the objective reality of this scene; it\u2019s all bundled up with Quell\u2019s neuroses, as he returns home from World War II, adrift and alcoholic and almost ruinously horny.<\/p>\n

Quell happens upon Dodd by chance, as the latter begins to build up The Cause, a Scientology-like religion full of pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy. Dodd rankles at challenges to his credentials, or his authority in general; at one Cause meeting, he haughtily dismisses one questioner with well-coiffed confidence until the man\u2019s persistence finally causes Dodd to rip the lid off of his rage and call out \u201cPigfuck!\u201d in a way that suggests he had been suppressing the epithet for the entire interaction. Yet Quell\u2019s far more insinuating way of challenging him\u2014by quite evidently not being a true believer, by attaching his lostness to this temporary solution that probably can\u2019t last\u2014elicits Dodd\u2019s admiration alongside his frustration. Quell\u2019s id-like, tortured soul reflects Dodd\u2019s own divided psyche, the raging, redfaced side of himself he attempts to hide behind a quasi-academic composure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hoffman conveys all of this while saying almost none of it. His occasional outbursts recall Punch-Drunk Love, and his queasy fascination with Quell plays like a more refined version of Scotty\u2019s transparent longings; mostly, though, past Hoffman performances are only faint, ghostly echoes, with that character-actor ethos emerging again. Dodd puts that sensibility into lofty, borderline ridiculous words: \u201cIf we meet again in the next life,\u201d he tells Quell before he leaves The Cause for good, \u201cyou will be my sworn enemy, and I will show you no mercy.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Anderson was ahead of the curve in his casting of Hoffman, how Lancaster Dodd might be reflected in his future roles remains a mystery. The Master proved an unexpected culmination of Anderson and Hoffman\u2019s working relationship when Hoffman died in 2014. He was 46. He made a couple of small non-Hunger Games pictures in between The Master and his death, but The Master feels like his last big one\u2014and his first really big one for Anderson, despite the pair serving as each other\u2019s most frequent major collaborator. Hoffman often lurks around the edges of Anderson\u2019s movies; that\u2019s true even for his co-starring role in The Master. Lancaster Dodd strives to be the focus of a mass movement, but the film\u2019s fixation is Freddie Quell\u2019s inability to fit in rather than Dodd\u2019s attempts to dictate the fitting.<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s something both familiar and completely new about having Hoffman\u2019s son Cooper star outright in Licorice Pizza<\/a>, a coming-of-age comedy released almost eight years after the older Hoffman\u2019s death. Cooper Hoffman is his own person, giving a lovely performance in Licorice Pizza that falls far afield from how his dad might have played it, had he somehow been given the chance as a teenager. The elder Hoffman brought spiritual weight to many of his performances; he\u2019s hilarious in Punch-Drunk Love, but the Mattress Man also appears profoundly unhappy. As teenage actor, entrepreneur, and all-around bullshitter Gary Valentine, Cooper Hoffman has a buoyancy that lifts him up even as he capably conveys jealousy, disappointment, pettiness, and anger as needed. Cast in the shadow of his father\u2019s death, subtly underlined by Gary\u2019s father never appearing in the film, that lightness never feels lightweight.<\/p>\n

But that sadness isn\u2019t remotely part of the movie\u2019s text; Licorice Pizza is the highest-spirited of Anderson\u2019s career. Yet for those who love Hoffman\u2019s work, a melancholy awareness creeps in; in a barely perceptible way, Philip Seymour Hoffman lingers around the edge of this movie, too. The older Hoffman flashed an ingratiating star quality in certain parts; so far, the younger Hoffman leads with that quality<\/a>, with flashes of something weightier. Towards the end of Licorice Pizza, when Gary is stalking around his latest business, throwing kids out of his Pinball Palace seemingly out of frustration that he\u2019s not enjoying himself more, Hoffman\u2019s brusqueness uncannily mimics his dad\u2014in one mode, anyway. This was the scene of the movie where Philip Seymour Hoffman helps you out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With\u00a0Together Again, Jesse Hassenger looks at actors and directors who have worked together on at least three films,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-169737","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}