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), which I had completely forgotten, being rather drunk at the time, and shortly to have my very first celebrity intervention. My crew of willowy lounge hipsters were at a bar in the East Village, Black Star, drinking to our waning health as usual and straining to seem arch and debonair and that the DJ's music wasn't hurting our hangovers from the previous evening, when the wrap party for the Happiness cast materialized like a very odd circus, a stranger lot you couldn't imagine in that hipster bar. The super skinny bespectacled 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? What next? Our circles were the only ones there so we gradually spilled into each other, my friends grilling them on their weird movie, and them all awkward 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 with no need to flaunt an ego. That was his part of his strange power - no one expected what he could deliver.
I mention this because the strangeness of it all clearly made an impression, this guy seemed more like a sound tech than an actor, like a technician or scholar of the craft rather than a star, so it was no surprise to see him holding a boom in Boogie Nights. I didn't like his needy character in that film, he reminded me of a joneser that used to hang on me the way he was hanging on Dirk Diggler, and didn't trust him onscreen until 1999's Talented Mr. Ripley when he teases Ripley on the boat, "How's the peepin', Tommy? How's the peepin'?" Finally I got it. He stole the shit out of that movie, not easy when Jude Law was already 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 Carson McCullers territory, compelling us to behold his naked redhead pale shoulders in the same frame as hunky Wahlberg, dewy-eyed Moore and voluptuous Heather Graham. Slowly, surely, he was transcending his awkward endomorphic persona to become a titan of the big screen, through sheer chops and balls. His hospice nurse in Magnolia (1999), eyes foggy with opiate nurturing, lighting Robards' invisible cigarette and helping that great actor confront his mortality (Robards died shortly after filming) was like a grounding slump-postured angel of compassion in the spastic orbit of a beautiful people dysfunctional family. You couldn't help but be awed.
I still haven't seen Capote, but he was the best thing by a landslide (as rock critic Lester Bangs) in Almost Famous, this time trying to drag that crappy under-drug-fueled film into something like real rock rather than letting it completely succumb to Crowe's clueless straight-edge 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!" and a few great sessions in the dark with the hooch in The Master, god that film would have been a bore. In short, he was such a force that he could be counted on to steady nearly every roiling vessel of a film, steering shallowness towards the rocks of depth, and from maelstrom depth towards the rough but ready straits of genuine subversion energy. As his film career took off it became kind of off-putting to see him doing so well, knowing he was coming up in a film you were about to see was intimidating, scary, but ultimately gratifying, like getting Tolstoy wrapped up in your McDonalds.
Like so many OD-ed icons, one wonders if the rehab had lowered his tolerance to the dose he was used to, I presume, that killed him. Heroin is deadly that way I hear. I've never tried it, but I'm glad now I haven't. The year of that wrap party was the year I was struggling with the booze, it was killing me even as I was proclaiming I didn't have an addictive personality, and believing it as we put out feelers for heroin with boozed-up curiosity. That's the trouble with being artistic and into drugs, you can usually justify your usage by turning out art while high because it seems like a masterpiece, and it's fun. 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. No wonder we're so discontent that we need to either be high 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 to always trump size, shape, and pigmentation. Cinema didn't even know it needed him, but once it got a taste it needed more and more, and now it will need its own rehab counseling to come to terms with today's great loss. It won't get it.
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