performance: the man who wasn't there

Philip Seymour Hoffman
photographed by Michael Thompson, GQ January 2001
This is no Photoshop job, ladies and gentlemen. Philip Seymour Hoffman was on the cover of GQ a couple of years ago and he looks pretty GQ, wouldn't you say? As one of the most consistent working actors (actor, not movie star) in contemporary cinema, Seymour Hoffman has the kind of pedigree attached to his name that you figure anything he's in must be good, or at the very least of interest for the scenes he's featured in. His pink face and unashamed rotund belly allow him to slip into the shadows of just about any character he plays, lending those features to portrayals of less than pretty people in less than pretty worlds. Last year he hit a trifecta with impressive turns in "When the Devil Knows You're Dead", "Charlie Wilson's War", and "The Savages" and this year he was perfectly pathetic as the theater director obsessed with his own mortality in Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" and a gentle giant mistaken for a monster in John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt." I know I said I wouldn't see the film, but if anything it was a chance to see some great Acting (it's such grandstanding acting that it deserves the capitalization). Seymour Hoffman goes up against Meryl Streep with confident ferocity in a movie that unfortunately feels like all of the action happens in a Tupperware container, and by that I mean it's too hermetically sealed in its own theatrical set pieces and uneven performance styles. It's an honest and convincing performance in a movie that doesn't always feel as such. I'd recommend checking out the lengthy article on the humble actor in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.