VEILED THREATS by Phil Mershon
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    • Blow Up
    • Requiem for a Heavyweight
    • Hurry Sundown
  • Human Flood
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      • I Confess
      • Dial M for Murder
      • Rear Window
      • To Catch a Thief
      • The Wrong Man
      • Suspicion
      • Saboteur
      • Lifeboat
      • Notorious
      • Rope
      • North by Northwest
      • Psycho
      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
    • Zabriskie Point
    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
    • The Visitors
    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
    • Pi
    • Erik the Viking
    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    • A Bullet for Pretty Boy
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CAPOTE
​The first time I saw him in a movie was while watching The Scent of a Woman (1992), a movie for which I never developed much fondness. Chris O'Donnell didn't quite break through in the picture, and while Al Pacino gave his all for his art, somehow I never believed a blind man could drive a Ferrari. What I did like about the film was the performance of a young man billed as Philip S. Hoffman. He played a complex character named George Willis Jr., a kind of big mouth EverySlob who wants to do the right thing but has too many options before him, none of them especially pleasant. For most other actors--indeed, for most actors who had yet to establish anything close to a personal style--this role would have represented a banal diversion from summer stock. But Hoffman invested such life in his character that I made a point of wondering if he would use his appearance as a springboard.
   Neither When a Man Loves a Woman nor Twister did much for me other than induce yawns and unintended laughter, respectively. Then I watched Boogie Nights (1997), a movie about which I still cannot decide if I think it was brilliant or despicable. Whatever else it was, it certainly was accurate, not that that is an excuse. The most accurate character in the film was Scotty J., a heavyset, timid boom operator who has a crush on Mark Wahlberg's character. His portrayal was so dead on that it physically hurt. This time out he was billed as Philip Seymour Hoffman. 
   Hoffman went on to appear in The Big Lebowski, Patch Adams, Almost Famous (where he completely stole the show as Lester Bangs), Along Came Polly, and Cold Mountain, among other treats. 
   He was almost there. He had carved out a name for himself, perhaps even earned the title bestowed on him by Jon Stewart as "the greatest actor in America." 
   In 2005 United Artists released Capote and there was no longer any doubt that Stewart had been correct. 
  Roger Ebert wrote at the time that Hoffman "channeled" Capote, rather than imitated him, a crucial distinction. Until his death in 1984, writer Truman Capote had been the butt of many idiotic impressionists who felt fine mimicking someone with far more talent than they themselves ever possessed. Watching Hoffman's Capote explain to a grieving survivor about how he had been ridiculed most of his life for the way he looked and spoke, we get a genuine sense as to how those barbs not only hurt, but were used by their target to ingratiate himself with other wannabe misfits. 
   The movie focuses on the period of time when Capote was working on his "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood, a book which belongs right up there with other masterpieces of the 1960s, punching its way through the crowd alongside Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Dick, Ursula LeGuin, Philip Roth, William Styron, Saul Bellow and Harper Lee, the latter figuring prominently in this movie. I for one never knew that the author of To Kill a Mockingbird had been tight with Truman Capote, much less that she had based the character Dill on him. 
   From the moment we meet Capote, we get a sense of a man who tries hard to be detached from human feelings, as when he tells the sheriff that he doesn't care one way or another whether they catch the killers of the Clutter family, or when one of the killers asks if it's true that he knows Elizabeth Taylor and he replies "I know a lot of people."
   Yet this is a person who feels. He feels, you should pardon the cliche, too deeply. Every wound he has ever received, every sincere complement in which he has basked, and every lame attempt at flattery he has deflected has implanted itself in his mind and, as he likes to remind us, he has a 94% accuracy rate with recalling conversations. 
  He manipulates the killers, He manipulates the press. He uses people for his art. On some level, all of them recognize this ill-treatment. "What's the name of your book?" one of the murderers keeps asking. If the writer admits the title, the killer will know that he is being used. So Capote lies. And the killer knows he lies.
  While this is Hoffman's movie from the starting gate, he does benefit from a superb support cast, in particular from the always watchable Chris Cooper as the sheriff who is consumed with a need for justice in the case of the four murders, and from Catherine Keener as Harper Lee, the woman who not only acts as Capote's bodyguard but who is the only person we meet who understands the conflux that motivates him. 
   What motivated Philip Hoffman I cannot say. The reports of his death in February 2014 devastated me and, if you have read this far, perhaps they devastated you as well. Dead at forty-six from a mix of drugs, including heroin and cocaine. Well, that was certainly a waste. He had been sober twenty-three years, checked into rehab the previous May, then went about his business. No one with that much talent can be said to be haunted only by demons. The angels had their impact too. But sometimes the ugliness we synthesize in order to get through pockets of time in our lives enlarge the human tragedy to the point where the ugliness is all we can sense. Then we take just a little bit more on our way to the big sleep. 
   We miss you, Philip Seymour Hoffman. We wish you could rejoin us. Things have not been the same.
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  • Home
  • Links
  • The Deluge
    • Veiled Threats >
      • 1939-1945
      • 1946-1963
      • 1964-1975
      • 1976-1985
      • Born Losers
      • Don't Look Back
      • Bonnie and Clyde
      • Cool Hand Luke
      • The Graduate
      • Up Tight!
      • Cycle Savages
      • Wild in the Streets
      • Never a Dull Moment
      • Yellow Submarine
      • Night of the Living Dead
      • Faces
      • The Love Bug
      • Midnight Cowboy
      • Easy Rider
      • Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
      • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
      • They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
      • The Magic Christian
      • Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
      • The Landlord
      • The Ballad of Cable Hogue
      • Getting Straight
      • The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
      • Five Easy Pieces
      • Godard in America
      • Gimme Shelter
      • Little Big Man
      • The Boys in the Band
      • Joe
      • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
      • The Big Boss
      • There's a Girl in my Soup
      • The Liberation of L B Jones
      • Klute
      • The French Connection
      • Willie Dynamite
      • Helter Skelter
      • King: A Filmed Record
      • Get Carter
      • Harold and Maude
      • Panic in Needle Park
      • Across 110th Street
      • And Soon the Darkness
      • Deliverance
      • Rolling Thunder
      • Super Fly
      • Busting
      • The Ruling Class
      • The Harder They Come
      • Day of the Jackal
      • Play Misty For Me
      • The Jezebels
      • Sacco & Vanzetti
      • Badlands
      • Cold Turkey
      • Soldier Blue
      • American Graffiti
      • The Falcon and the Snowman
      • Watership Down
      • Scarecrow
      • Walking Tall
      • Frances
      • The Coca-Cola Kid
      • Bob Roberts
      • Bad Company
      • We Are Marshall
      • Patton
      • The Natural
      • The Crossing Guard
      • Reds
      • The Spook Who Sat by the Door
      • Mud
      • Who is Harry Nilsson
      • Ornette: Made in America
      • Six Degrees of Separation
      • This Film is Not Yet Rated
      • Incident at Oglala
      • That Championship Season
      • The Pope of Greenwich Village
      • Little Murders
      • Assault on Precinct 13
      • Capote
      • Inglourious Basterds
      • The Friends of Eddie Coyle
      • Scorpio
      • The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
      • A New Leaf
      • Seven Psychopaths
      • The Last House on the Left
      • The Deer Hunter
      • Let the Right One In
      • Colour Me Kubrick
      • A Time to Kill
      • A Scanner Darkly
      • Salem's Lot
      • Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired
      • The Seven-Ups
      • The Contender
      • Hoffa
      • The Pledge
      • American: The Bill Hicks Story
      • Donnie Brasco
      • Bugsy
      • Milk
      • Reservoir Dogs
      • Glengarry Glen Ross
      • V for Vendetta
      • Trumbo
      • Two in the Wave
      • South of the Border
      • Into the Abyss
      • God Bless America
  • Before the Deluge
    • The Bicycle Thief
    • Judgment at Nuremberg
    • Five Minutes to Live
    • The Manchurian Candidate
    • Hud
    • Pressure Point
    • Blow Up
    • Requiem for a Heavyweight
    • Hurry Sundown
  • Human Flood
    • Jean-Luc Godard >
      • Breathless
      • Masculine Feminine
      • Film Socialisme
    • Brian De Palma >
      • Sisters
      • The Fury
    • Stanley Kubrick >
      • Lolita
      • 2001: A Space Odyssey
      • A Clockwork Orange
      • The Shining
      • Full Metal Jacket
    • Francis Coppola >
      • The Conversation
      • Apocalypse Now
    • Woody Allen >
      • Take the Money and Run
      • Bananas
      • Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But were Afraid to Ask
      • Sleeper
      • Love and Death
      • Annie Hall
      • Interiors
      • Manhattan
      • Stardust Memories
      • Zelig
      • Broadway Danny Rose
      • The Purple Rose of Cairo
      • Hannah and Her Sisters
      • Radio Days
    • Robert Altman >
      • M*A*S*H
      • Brewster McCloud
      • 3 Women
      • Nashville
      • The Gingerbread Man
      • Ready to Wear
      • Gosford Park
      • The Player
    • Luis Bunuel >
      • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    • Roman Polanski >
      • Cul-de-Sac
      • Rosemary's Baby
      • MacBeth
      • The Tenant
    • Martin Scorsese >
      • Boxcar Bertha
    • Steven Spielberg >
      • Duel
    • Oliver Stone >
      • Talk Radio
    • Orson Welles >
      • F For Fake
    • Akira Kurosawa >
      • DODES'KA-DEN
    • Max Ophuls
    • John Ford >
      • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    • John Huston
    • Frank Capra
    • Billy Wilder
    • Roger Corman
    • Bernardo Bertolucci
    • Elia Kazan
    • William Wyler
    • Spike Lee
    • Francois Truffaut >
      • 400 Blows
      • Jules and Jim
      • Bed and Board
    • Jean Renoir
    • Federico Fellini
    • Charlie Chaplin
    • John Cassavetes
    • Agnes Vargas
    • Alain Resnais
    • Eric Rohmer >
      • Claire's Knee
    • Ida Lupino
    • Leni Riefenstahl
    • Penny Marshall
    • Costa-Gavras >
      • The Confession
      • Missing
    • Alfred Hitchcock >
      • Spellbound
      • Shadow of a Doubt
      • The Birds
      • I Confess
      • Dial M for Murder
      • Rear Window
      • To Catch a Thief
      • The Wrong Man
      • Suspicion
      • Saboteur
      • Lifeboat
      • Notorious
      • Rope
      • North by Northwest
      • Psycho
      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
    • Zabriskie Point
    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
    • The Visitors
    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
    • Pi
    • Erik the Viking
    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    • A Bullet for Pretty Boy
  • Links