Rest in peace, Toni Erdmann

It's useful for a cinephile to periodically go through the Wikipedia page "[current year] in film," not only to check the release schedule and see what you might have missed, but also to see who died without you noticing. 

I did that just now. The random prompt was the death of an actor I didn't recognize named Peter Spellos, who actually was in one of my favorite movies of all time, Bound. This is not an in memoriam piece for Peter Spellos.

My eyebrows raised over a few I hadn't noticed as they occurred, but my face drooped when I read that a different Peter S., Peter Simonischek, had died. This happened back in May.

You may not recognize that name, but you probably recognize the face in the photo I've included here.

Indeed he played Toni Erdmann in the film of the same name, my #1 of 2016.

I had only seen Simonischek in one other film, as the attention he garnered from Toni Erdmann earned him a small role in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. As such, that would not meet my ordinary threshold for eulogizing him here. So maybe more than anything I am writing this post to suggest the value of reviewing Wikipedia's film-related deaths in any given year.  

But I am also more saddened by this than I would be by the death of most other actors I had seen in only two films. And it has something to do with the perfect mixture of whimsy and melancholy that Simonischek poured into the titular trickster, who's actually a softie who just wants to connect better with his daughter. Although Simonischek was 76 when he died, which is not exactly young, I didn't feel like the man I saw in that movie just seven years ago was this close to death's door.

Also I suppose I have had Toni Erdmann on the brain a bit lately as I know that the movie's other co-star, Sandra Huller, appears in one of this year's most acclaimed films, Anatomy of a Fall. Which had me thinking how I wanted to make sure I saw that film, even beyond the fact that it is acclaimed, just because Huller is in it.

And that got me thinking how we come to feel as though the people in our favorite movies are sort of "our own," especially if they are a favorite not widely shared. I think anyone who saw Toni Erdmann thought it was excellent, but I think a lot of people didn't see it, and even many of those who did would not have named it their #1 of that year. I did, so both Peter Simonischek and Sandra Huller "belong" to me in a way that others of you out there may understand, even if it is not about these two in particular.

Maybe when I see Anatomy of a Fall, I will raise a toast to the woman on screen and the man who played her father in one of the more moving portraits of a complicated father-daughter relationship I've ever seen on film.