Philip Seymour Hoffman is us

Least supporting actor
So what’s surprising isn’t that Hoffman won the Academy Award for best actor for “Capote,” it’s that “Capote” was his first nomination. All those great supporting performances in the last 10 years and nary a nod. In his more acclaimed films, other, better-looking actors got the noms: Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore for “Boogie Nights,” Tom Cruise for “Magnolia,” Jude Law for “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Kate Hudson and Frances McDormand for “Almost Famous” and Jude Law and Rene Zellwegger for “Cold Mountain.” Until last March, Hoffman stayed home Oscar night.

This exclusion actually makes an odd kind of sense. Hoffman is so interesting he sometimes turns our interest away from the lead, and that makes him the least supporting actor. After Lester Bangs shows up in “Almost Famous,” railing against the people who are destroying rock ‘n roll, and needing this kid almost as much as the kid needs him, who wants to follow that idiot rock band? Let’s get back to Bangs! Do we really care about the romance between Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt at the center of the “Twister” storm? No. But we love this big friendly scientist who’s ready to embrace life in his big friendly arms. 

Remember “Patch Adams”? Great box office, horrible film. Title character wants doctors to care. Nasty dean of med school doesn’t. Hence: conflict. Patch even has the typical, snobby, blue-blood roommate we’re supposed to hate. Except there’s a late-night confrontation between the roomies and the film is upended:

Patch (Robin Williams): Why don't you like me? You're a prick and I like you.
Mitch (Hoffman): Because you make my effort a joke! I want to be a doctor. This isn't a game to me! This isn't playtime! This is serious business. I have it in me to be a great doctor, but in order to do that I have to sacrifice if I want to be better.
Patch: "Better." Better than me, hmm?
Mitch: I will save lives that could have otherwise not been saved. Now, I could be like you and go around laughing and have a good time, ha ha, but I prefer to learn, because the more I learn, the more likely I will have the right answer at the crucial moment and save a life.

The filmmakers give Patch the final word, but if you’re a thinking person you realize Mitch is right. More, you identify with Mitch. Most of us try so hard in life and yet there’s always some idiot who hardly tries at all and still passes us up. Mitch could have been a clichéd, reviled character but Hoffman gave him humanity. We begin to love Mitch and begin to dislike (if we didn’t already loathe) the title character. It’s a great moment, but hardly “supporting.”

How flawed we are
The fact that we identify with Mitch rather than Patch recalls something Hoffman told David Edelstein in a recent New York Times profile. Illuminating his struggle to keep Truman Capote less attractive in “Capote,” Hoffman said, “The way toward empathy is actually to be as hard as possible on this character. The harder you are, the more empathy you'll gain, ultimately, by the end.” When Edelstein questioned him on this — less attractive equals more empathy? — Hoffman added, “I think deep down inside, people understand how flawed they are. I think the more benign you make somebody, the less truthful it is.”

“Patch Adams” is as benign as meringue but Mitch is a hard nugget of reality within it. The “Almost Famous” rock band, Stillwater, is a sugar-coated version of Led Zeppelin but Lester Bangs delivers the truth. I never understood people who applauded Harper Lee for condemning Truman at the end of “Capote.” Capote says he couldn’t have done anything to save Perry Smith and Richard Hickock from execution, and she responds, “Maybe not, Truman. But the truth is you didn’t want to.” Ah, but the truth is he did want to. That’s the tragedy. Once he got going he was going to betray someone — Alvin Dewey, the people of Holcomb, those who demand an eye for an eye — and in the end he chose to betray the murderers, including Perry, whom he loved. It saved his non-fiction novel, “In Cold Blood,” but it destroyed the writer in him. That’s the tragedy. In the movie Harper Lee knows no tragedy and comes off as a prig. She casts stones because her character is without sin. Who can identify with that?

Of course most people go to the movies for transference, not identification. They want to pretend to be what they’re not (John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, etc.), while Hoffman keeps giving us what we are: the gambler who can’t stop gambling; the lonely, paunchy man in boxers making obscene phone calls in an age of *69; the man sniffing gasoline to forget his wife’s suicide.

But some of us, every once in a while, go to the movies for identification rather than transference, for truth rather than wish-fulfillment, and when we do Hoffman is there for us, our sad, rumpled stand-in, reminding us that we’re not alone. The “I’m a f---ing idiot” scene is painful to watch because we’ve all been there, and it’s glorious to watch because we’ve all been there, and if there is beauty in truth then Scotty J. is beautiful, and so is Mitch Roman and Rusty Zimmerman and Phil Parma and Freddie Miles and Lester Bangs and Freddy Lounds and Jacob Elinsky and Truman Capote. And maybe, just maybe, we are, too.

Erik Lundegaard has 14 percent recall of all conversation. He can be reached at:

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