Learning of his death today I instantly remembered meeting Phillip Seymour Hoffman once, in 1997 or so at the wrap party for Todd Solonz's Happiness (1998). My crew of willowy lounge hipsters were at a bar in the East Village called Black Star, drinking to our waning health as usual, when the wrap party for the Happiness cast materialized out of nowhere. We watched them all suddenly appear and a stranger lot you couldn't imagine in that pretty hipster person bar. The super skinny dweeb Solondz, a gigantic Mama Cass of a lady (Camryn Manheim) each making the other more freakish by comparison and dowdy young turk Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whom when we learned was an up and coming movie star left us incredulous. This guy? It seemed like a joke. We couldn't imagine him as the type to even hang out in a lounge like Black Star, and our big circle and the pair gradually spilling into each other, my friends grilling them on their weird movie, and them all shy except Hoffman who easily blended into either camp and patiently explained the movie to our mild fascination. He was a regular guy, a shaggy portly ginger. That was his part of his strange power - no one expected what he could deliver.
I mention this because none of my crew or I forgot his plain down-to-earth normal guyness, the way if you had to circle who the future star would be in that bar that night he wouldn't even make the top 20, yet there he was. He seemed more like a boom mic operator than an actor, so it was no surprise to see him holding one in Boogie Nights. I didn't like his needy Carson McCullers-ish character in that film, and didn't trust him onscreen until 1999's Talented Mr. Ripley when he teases Ripley on the boat, "How's the peepin', Ripley? How's the peepin'?" Finally I got it. He stole the shit out of that movie, not easy when Jude Law was stealing it from Matt Damon before he even showed up. When I revisited Boogie Nights after that I no longer felt threatened as I had originally, feeling like he was trying to drag the hot arc of the film into lovestruck dweebiness, compelling us to behold his naked redhead pale shoulders in the same frame as hunky Marky Mark and voluptuous Heather Graham, crying and carrying on like a tainted pear. Slowly, surely, he was transcending his double whammy curse of being a redhead and portly to become a titan of the big screen, through sheer chops and balls. His hospice nurse in Magnolia (1999) blew our minds -- eyes foggy with opiate nurturing, lighting Robards' invisible cigarette and helping that great actor confront his mortality (he died shortly after filming) right there onscreen, like a grounding slump postured angel of compassion in the spastic orbit of a beautiful people dysfunctional family.
I still haven't seen Capote, but he was the best thing by a landslide as Greil Marcus in Almost Famous, this time trying to drag that crappy under-drug-fueled film into something like real rock rather than letting his scenes succumb to Crowe's clueless pop dorkiness-- so in the opposite direction in which I used to feel he was dragging movies. And if not for his few outbursts like "Pig FUCK!" in The Master, god that film would have been rawther craftsmanship boring. In short, he was such a force that he could be counted on to steady nearly every roiling vessel of a film, steering hottie shallowness towards the rocks of depth, and movies suffering from maelstrom depth towards the rough but ready straits of genuine subversion energy.
Like so many OD-ed icons, one wonders if the rehab had lowered his tolerance to the dose he was used to. Heroin is deadly that way I hear. I've never tried it, but I'm glad. I tried everything else and it all almost killed me a dozen times over. He was my age, 46, the same age Kurt Cobain: born 1967, the year of the Summer of Love. We'd been watching the world's beauty dwindle ever since, our memories of our own innocence and America's tied hand in hand. No wonder we're so discontent that we need to either be high, in recovery, or holding tight to our newly won sobriety like a life raft; Black Star has been closed now for 10 years at least, and whatever bar opened in its space also long closed, I'm sure, to be replace probably by a Chase branch. New York City may yet return to a place where art can thrive, and young people can live without having to retire to Bushwick once the bars close, but it will have to do it without this sweet Falstaff-Harry hybrid prince of actors, this exhibit A of the power of spirit and devotion to resonant craft in trumping size, shape, and pigmentation. He could do anything and cinema will need its own rehab counseling to come to terms its new shortage of gravitas.
