A farewell double feature for an acting treasure

On the second-to-last night of my 2014 viewing season, I watched two movies starring a man we lost in 2014.

The fact that I didn't watch them sooner may be some indication of my general interest in them, but I did ultimately come around to renting Philip Seymour Hoffman's last two features that weren't Hunger Games movies. It felt like a fitting way to (almost) close out the year.

My resistance to A Most Wanted Man was based largely on its genre. I like the cast (Rachel McAdams and Willem Defoe beyond Hoffman) and I really like the director (Anton Corbijn of Control). But I generally don't like spy thrillers, if only because I tend to find characters more interesting than labyrinthine plots of who's double-crossing whom and the stakes of each double-cross. Turns out, A Most Wanted Man is more about post-9/11 anti-terrorism intelligence than the governments spying on other governments seen in most spy movies, but since John Le Carre wrote the novel it's based on, it's a spy movie.

I didn't really care for it one way or the other, giving it three stars largely for the competence of its execution than as any indication of how it truly held my interest the whole time. It did pick up after a very slow start, which also helped keep my review in positive territory.

Hoffman? I don't love that one of his final showcases was in German-accented English. It reminded me of the essential artifice of this type of movie, since we know the characters would really just be speaking German. However, that's an unavoidable bit of suspension of disbelief, and I don't want to punish Hoffman or the movie for that. I suppose if the movie had worked for me better overall, the performance would have also connected with me more. There's no doubt it's a good performance, but those who are looking to find a summation of Hoffman's career in this performance should remember that he didn't know it was going to be one of his last roles when he shot the film. Sometimes, a movie is just a movie.

God's Pocket I knew a lot less about. Only once I started watching did I remember that it was the directing debut of Mad Men actor John Slattery. I suppose it was the title itself that sort of interested me, but in equal measure I was turned off by John Turturro, who has had a bad 2014. It's the story of lowlifes and, I guess, midlifes in a small insular town called God's Pocket, where outsiders are never fully trusted and everyone seems to be involved in the dual pursuits of low-level criminal enterprise and pickling their liquors. An extremely disagreeable twentysomething played by Caleb Landry Jones really put me off this movie from the start.

But then -- there's no spoiler alert necessary because it happens so early -- this character dies, and the movie started to click better for me after that. I started to do something I couldn't really do in A Most Wanted Man: feel for/relate to/understand the characters. I thought this town might be full of contrived shlubs, but instead they started to feel real to me. The always-great Richard Jenkins is around to contribute to that, and Christina Hendricks seemed like something other than a fantasy doll for the first time to me.

Hoffman? This is more the performance that would seem to serve as a career summation, because though Hoffman has played intelligence operatives before (see Charlie Wilson's War), he's played a lot more shlubs (see, well, almost everything else he's been in). His character is clearly a screw-up, but he makes choices in the movie that are rather heroic, despite ample evidence that he should not make such a choice under those circumstances. He's an imperfect man trying to get by, and that connected to me more.

I gave this one three stars as well, but a slightly more enthusiastic three stars than Most Wanted.

I don't need to finish with some grand overarching comment about the man, in part because I'm writing this post under rather rushed/distracted circumstances, and in part I've already written a eulogy of sorts for him (see here for that).

I do want to say, though, that I'll miss him. He was one of the greats, and I'm glad I dedicated an evening to appreciating his talents one last time.

Was it really one last time, though? No, it wasn't. I now consider myself fortunate not yet to have seen such films as Flawless, Love Liza, Owning Mahoney, Jack Goes Boating, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, Pirate Radio and of course The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. 

So I still have the pleasure of more Philip Seymour Hoffman yet to come.

On struggling with addiction

I couldn't figure out how best to memorialize Philip Seymour Hoffman on my blog. To be sure, I don't memorialize everyone who dies on this blog, just as I don't go out of my way to praise or savage every film I see that affects me either positively or negatively.

But I was hit pretty hard by the death of this great Character Actor, who elevated the job to capital letters. And I realized that it was the circumstances of his death that did the hard hitting.

Hoffman was always carrying a few extra pounds on him, so if he had gone the way of James Gandolfini last year, it might not have surprised anyone. We would have thought it a bit young -- Gandolfini had five years on Hoffman. But then again, John Candy died of a heart attack three years younger than Hoffman was when he died. We would have been devastated, but we wouldn't have been shocked.

It's shock I felt when I learned that Hoffman died a rock star's death, lying on his bathroom floor with a needle sticking out of his arm.

The shock not only came from the basic graphic aspect of his death scene, one that pops into your mind's eye and then doesn't dislodge itself, but from the fact that I didn't even know he was an addict. I don't always read up on the private lives of celebrities, and if I had, maybe I would have known about P.S. Hoffman's struggles with heroin. But I hadn't, so I didn't.

Then what struck me was that addiction has an awful power that is always freshly awful to contemplate. I've been contemplating it in my own life recently, and if you'll allow me to indulge in a little introspection and sort of making Hoffman's death about me, I hope you won't be sorry.

Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you I struggle with an addiction to drugs or alcohol or sex or something that genuinely has the power to kill me. In fact, I'm going to risk making light of Hoffman's death by telling you what I am addicted to:

Movies.

But before you scoff and scream "How dare you?", let me tell you that I don't mean this the least bit whimsically -- even if the outcome of my addiction figures to be far less catastrophic.

If you recall -- and you should, because I keep mentioning it -- I went on a movie diet a little more than two weeks ago. This diet was designed to limit my intake of movies to two per week, in the interest of exploring other aspects of my life that I had been ignoring -- you know, little things like family, career, and a current understanding of the state of the world.

I figured that I was addicted to movies, even though I didn't come out and say it. Starting my movie diet was my way of checking myself into rehab. Something that, sadly, did not save Philip Seymour Hoffman when he tried it last year.

I have adhered to my diet so far. In the week just completed, I did watch three movies, but the third was legal under the guidelines of the diet. I said that I would exceed three for the week if my wife instigated the watching of any movies over my allotment of two. Sure enough, she came to me on Sunday afternoon, when my older son's aunt and grandmother had him out at the movies, and asked if now was a good time to watch This is Not a Film on Netflix. (Start discussing now whether this not-film even counts as a third film in the week.)

Actually, only one film last week was one I really wanted to watch for my own reasons. The second was Finding Nemo with my son on Saturday afternoon, so I was really taking one for the team there and counting it as my second viewing anyway.

So I'm doing well, right? I'm beating the addiction?

Not really. Truth is, in two weeks, I haven't done a lot of the things I said I was going to do in the time I haven't spent watching movies. And in fact, I've merely compensated for the loss in other movie-related ways.

For one, I've become a much more active participant in a movie discussion group on Facebook. Not only have I kept up with most of the threads, but I've been initiating more of my own than I usually do.

Then, I've picked up some old movie projects that I had abandoned. One is adding the rest of my movie list to Letterboxd. I've gotten up to the R's, whereas only a week or two ago I was in the K's. The other is catching up on Flickchart, where I'm adding a bunch of movies I've watched over the last two years that had never gotten added. I'm even subjecting my chart to a battery of focused dueling tests, as I blogged about here.

Additionally, I've added one new film-related podcast to my repertoire -- Slate's Culture Gabfest -- and of course, continued writing posts on this blog, at perhaps a heightened pace.

Why am I doing these things?

Well, because I'm an addict, of course.

Apples and oranges, right? Yeah, probably. I don't need to stop watching movies, I just need to manage them better so they don't dominate my life. And I can go on binges sometimes without harming myself or others.

But in other ways, no, not apples and oranges. Right now, movies are occupying a place on my spectrum of need that is not healthy. And I need to get them under control. 

So as Philip Seymour Hoffman succumbed to his demons of addiction, I couldn't help but think of my own. My demons won't kill me -- at least, I don't think they will -- but they could turn me into a depressive schlub, achieving only a fraction of what I one day hope to accomplish.

The kind of guy that the great Philip Seymour Hoffman might have played to perfection, in fact.