I saw Hoffman’s most recent film “Love Liza”, and was bored and annoyed. I love Philip Seymour Hoffman, I adore him, but the movie frustrated me with its lack of story. Yes, this man is in deep grief for his wife, he is lost, he is hurting, he is in a fog … but two hours of that doesn’t make a compelling movie! No matter how wonderful and actor Hoffman is. I find it so hard to believe that it won best screenplay at Sundance.
Roger Ebert just came out with his review of the film, and he liked it more than I did; gave it three stars. However, Ebert closes with a couple of paragraphs which I want to share here. Ebert analyzes characters in films … how so often characters in films only have emotions because the plot requires them to. How most movie characters only live on the celluloid, you do not get the sense that they are living breathing unpredictable humans, who continue to live when they are off-screen. The great movie characters do that. Occasionally I do find myself thinking, “Huh. Wonder what ever became of Travis Bickle.” Travis Bickle is not, technically, real. But he LIVES.
Anyway, I loved Ebert’s discussion of this issue at the end of his review for “Love Liza”:
Most movies do not contain real people; they contain puppets who conform to popular stereotypes and do entertaining things. In the recent and relatively respectable thriller “The Recruit,” for example, Colin Farrell doesn’t play a three-dimensional human, nor is he required to. He is a place-holder for a role that has been played before and will be endlessly played again–the kid who chooses a mentor in a dangerous spy game. He is pleasant, sexy, wary, angry, baffled, ambitious and relieved, all on cue, but these emotions do not proceed from his personality; they are generated by the requirements of the plot. Leaving the movie, we may have learned something about CIA spycraft (and a lot more about the manufacturers of thrillers), but there is not one single thing we will have learned about being alive.
Al Pacino is the co-star of that movie, defined and motivated as narrowly as Farrell is. In a new movie named “People I Know,” he plays a breathing, thinking human being, a New York press agent driven by drugs, drink, duty and a persistent loyalty to his own political idealism. We learn something about life from that performance. Pacino teaches us, as he is always capable of doing in the right role.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is a teacher, too. You should see “Love Liza” in anticipation of his new movie “Owning Mahowny,” which I saw at Sundance this year (“Love Liza” was at the 2002 festival, where it won the prize for best screenplay). The Mahowny character is at right angles to Wilson, but seems similarly blocked at an early stage of development. Observing how Mahowny, an addicted gambler, relates to his long-suffering fiancee (Minnie Driver), we can guess at the ordeal that Wilson put Liza through. He’s not cruel or angry or mean; he’s simply not … there. His eyes seek other horizons.
In an age when depression and Prozac are not unknown, when the popularity of New Age goofiness reflects an urgent need for reassurance, Hoffman may be playing characters much closer to the American norm than an action hero like Farrell. We cannot all outsmart the CIA and win the girl, but many of us know what it feels like to be stuck in doubt and confusion, and cornered by our own evasions.
There is a kind of attentive concern that Hoffman brings to his characters, as if he has been giving them private lessons, and now it is time for their first public recital. Whether or not they are ready, it can be put off no longer, and so here they are, trembling and blinking, wondering why everyone else seems to know the music.
