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I might have been late to the party in recognizing his talent, but as someone who doesn’t watch many movies and forgets an actor’s name within minutes of hearing it, the fact that his performance stood out the way it did says something.
He was, in that movie and in so many others, perhaps the perfect character actor, commanding the scenes he was supposed to command and blending in perfectly during the others, all with effortless grace. It was a flawless exhibition of a talent that only the finest supporting actors have: inherently knowing when it’s their turn, and when it is not.
And while I would not quite say that I was a devoted fan of his, I admit that seeing his deeply lined, stubbly face in a given trailer would lend the film instant credence. After all, if he was in it, there had to be some sort of depth, some redeeming quality, to be found, no matter how ridiculous the movie looked.
Consequentially, the news that the 46-year-old actor was found dead in his New York City apartment (reportedly due to a heroin overdose) isn’t so much "heartbreaking" as it is disappointing.
We all know the story of the "cursed" writer/actor/playwright/musician/etc. It’s far from new, and it’s a script that’s been acted out with tragic results in many a hotel bathroom. Each time it is sad, each time shocking, and Hoffman’s death is no different — just another famous man overflowing with talent who could not keep it together.
There was a time when I actually fell into the trap of believing that "doomed artist" myth. Writers and poets who died young, like Byron and Keats and Villon, had captured my imagination and tricked me into believing that living (and writing) with passion meant that you had to flame out early, or else you somehow weren’t doing it right.
Meanwhile, I looked with near-disdain on those like Yeats, who lived longer, more sober lives. If you’re around for so many years that you end up writing about how you’ve run out of things to write about, I thought, what’s the point of it all?
Looking back, I see that it was the foolishness of youth that made me think these things. There is no glory in dying before one’s time, and there is no beauty in hastening life’s end. And that’s why deaths like Hoffman’s are so absolutely frustrating: because they were avoidable.
I know that addiction is a disease, a savage battle that doesn’t end until the last breath leaves the body, and I know that we all have demons — some that nip at our heels a bit more closely than others.
But let’s not lie to each other here: absolving the drug-doer, the drunk, or the addict from any responsibility for their actions, or suggesting that their death wasn’t their fault, is disingenuous and dangerous.
This legendary actor wasn’t "taken from us," as so many Facebook and Twitter posts would have you believe. He quit. He threw in the towel. And what’s worse, after 23 years of sobriety, he knew that he was quitting, but went ahead and did it anyway.
There’s no honor in that, no Romantic notion of an accursed man who, as was once written about Jim Morrison, "felt life too intensely to bear living it."
Nah. That’s a copout, and a weak one at that, meant to justify the actions of selfish men who desert everyone who loves them.
What’s left behind — the shattered families, the regretful parents, the destroyed children — that’s the real tragedy. And it’s one that we’d do well not to forget.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
http://www.northjersey.com/arts-and-entertainment/celebrities/philip-seymour-hoffman-another-tragic-end-for-another-rare-talent-1.710424
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