Photo: Peggy Sirota
Terry Gross: “Have you ever been in therapy?”Philip Seymour Hoffman: “Not for acting. That’s my answer.”
It’s been said thousands of times since Sunday, but that doesn’t make it any less true: Any performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman, no what the film, was marked by its depth. Depth of feeling, depth of humanity, depth of artistry—in every way imaginable, his acting opened up space where before there had been none.
Hoffman didn’t just elevate every role (and every movie) he took on—he did it with alarming regularity. Since his 1997 breakthrough in Boogie Nights, Hoffman appeared in over 30 features, a frequency more in keeping with a character actor, or a star from a former age tied to the studio system. He worked his ass off because that was the kind of artist he was. You could see it every time he appeared on screen and in the sheer heft of his filmography.
Besides the tributes, there’s been plenty of discussion about the way Hoffman died, whether connecting it to an overall rise in heroin use or chronicling the history of the “Ace of Spades” brand that killed him. But is it fair to speculate on the man’s demons or how they affected his art? In Hoffman’s case, an utterly senseless, sad, and preventable death was grafted onto an incredibly rich public life. We aren’t in the territory of mangled careers and wasted ability. The man pushed himself every day, maybe because of his addiction, maybe in spite of. But what drove him to relapse, and whatever relationship it may have had to his art, is impossibly private.
In some ways, it’s also anything but exceptional—the polar opposite of Hoffman as we know him. This is the real, unglamorous face of addiction. Addiction doesn’t make narratives. It destroys them. It’s the antithesis of art, not located somewhere at the root of it. It’s a sickness, no different from cancer or arthritis.All we can know is that this man, who created so much, had somewhere in him that drive that will wreck everything if you let it. It couldn’t keep him from creating great art, but when it came to real life, to life outside of the imaginary space of film, he was as vulnerable as any of us—and it doesn’t take a special person to crave heroin. The tragic part is that special people like Philip Seymour Hoffman can’t survive any better than the rest of us.
The utter dissonance between Hoffman’s life and his work is what we’ll be struggling to process, as both fans and, as much as it’s possible, as people who care from afar. Hoffman was already so acclaimed, so celebrated, that even death can’t much amplify his reputation. What juts out, frightening and unfinished, is a life—the human part of the tragedy. Hoffman leaves behind three children under the age of 11, and that’s a gut-punch that doesn’t discriminate according to talent.
The absence of Philip Seymour Hoffman, actor, is hard to grasp. We can at least understand how truly awful it is for a father and friend to disappear so suddenly, and unfortunately, it’s a lesson that repeats itself over and over again with folks far more ordinary. As we mourn Hoffman with a level of compassion it’s generally hard to summon for celebrities we really don’t know at all, we’re also forced to process what it means when less celebrated folks are cut down like this.
Heroin gives us no great insight into Philip Seymour Hoffman’s art, nor is his art grounds for a referendum on heroin and tormented genius. Philip Seymour Hoffman was an actor and addict. We’ll never know how those two things lived together in him. Only that one killed him and that now, he’s never going to be remembered as just one or the other. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
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