Tag: Max Winter

Try to sympathize with me, for a second: Dallas, Texas was a
very difficult place to grow up during the 1980s. Put more specifically, it was
a difficult place to grow up if you were artistically minded or vulnerable or
smart, all of which I was. (I think.) Cars were important. Money was important.
Football was important. Status was important. Religion (as long as it was
Christian) was important. The intellectual life? Not highly valued.
Sensitivity? Not highly valued. Wit? Nix. Erudition? Nix. As I got older, all I
began to think of was escape: how
would I free myself from this environment? What could I do, as I grew up, to
ensure that I might live in a world that welcomed me, to a certain extent, or
at least tolerated me? As time passed, the answer became increasingly clear: get
to New York. And Gordon Willis had a great deal to do with that development.

I was nine when I first visited New York; I would be twelve
when I visited it again. I had heard plenty from my parents and their friends,
faculty at the local university, about the life of the city: the subways, the
homeless people, the smell of pretzels, the endless lines of numbered streets, the speed, the intense conversations, the immediacy.
But it was film that would truly draw me in, that would ultimately tell me New
York was my destination. Which films, exactly? Annie
Hall and Manhattan. Again, I’ll
ask for your empathy. I was 12. Most kids at my age were hopelessly sarcastic;
I was hopelessly self-deprecating. The idea of a man making fun of himself and
gaining something like an artistic reputation for it was both beyond my
understanding and seemingly too good to be true. But even farther beyond my
understanding was the city itself. What world was it Allen and his characters
were living in? A world in which a man and a woman might sit, all night, at
the foot of a grand bridge, its contours shadow-lit as the sun came up. A
world in which a man and a woman might stand on a balcony and the beauty of the
skyline behind them might be just enough to eclipse the wit and awkwardness of
the dialogue rolling out of their mouths. A world in which a writer might
make several false starts to a novel as the camera soared over a Petri dish of
skyscrapers. A world in which the soft-focus intimacy of a bar scene, of a
group of well-heeled friends out for drinks, might be enough to make you forget
Allen’s character was dating a teenager. A world in which there was no trash
on the sidewalks, everyone seemed fairly clean and well-dressed, the sky was
always sunny, the stone of the New York apartment buildings was always a
brilliant white or a blood-dark red or a surprisingly vivid brown. A world
in which the unspoken message was, You
think you’re watching a story onscreen, and you think you’re only here for the
laughs, but in reality, I, the city, am the real story. You’re here for me.

Gordon Willis was responsible for this. I had
emotional reactions to other films Willis had a part in, as well, of course. The first time I saw The Godfather, despite all the
encouragement I had had to dislike it for its glorification of violence, I
would have to admit that its visual lushness was breathtaking—again making the
action on screen, the shootings, the conspiracies, the tests of manhood, the
pathological Mafia rituals, the inherent
sense of machismo, seem almost beside the point. When I saw Pennies from
Heaven at age 11, I expected little from it besides a novel performance by Steve
Martin (was it going to be funny?); little did I know that, apart from being introduced to the surreal mind
of Dennis Potter, I would have a visual funhouse ride ahead of me: not only was
the intensity of the atmosphere he created—with its rainy nights, its dismal,
impoverished apartments, and its Hopper-like tableaux—thrilling to me, though I
didn’t have the vocabulary to explain why, My Eleven Year Old Self was both
scandalized and exhilarated by Christopher Walken’s dance number. The dimly lit
bar in which Walken tries to seduce Bernadette Peters with a wild tap-dance to
“Let’s Misbehave” was a magical place, not only because of its dim light but
because the light was not dim enough to conceal what seemed to My Eleven Year
Old Self like a waterfall of topless photos of women, a cascade of large,
fulsome female breasts. My Eleven Year Old Self’s jaw stayed open for a week. I
have only Willis to blame, or thank.

The fact is this: if you want real life, live it. If you
want psychodrama, create it. If you want to fall in love, go after it with an
open heart. If you want to be transported, though, if you want to feel that
you’re immersed thoroughly in an individual’s vision of a story, a world, and
the degree to which one might shape the other, go to the movies. Most
specifically, if you wish, Gordon Willis’s movies. He was a master of unearthly
transport who, without knowing it, changed my life. I moved to New York when I
was 18 and would live there, with few interruptions, for 25 years. And, regardless
of what I discovered—that New York is dirty, that not every conversation will
be backlit with golden light, that staying up all night is not as glorious as
it might seem—Willis’s vision stayed with me, and still stays with me.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

I find myself increasingly tired of seeing Andrew Garfield’s face
these days. This puzzles me, given
that I’m a fan of his of long standing—or as long as one could be for an actor
of his young age. What about his success and sudden ubiquity might bother me?
Wouldn’t I want the best for such a talented, charismatic, young actor? Then it
hits me, as it has hit me so many times before: I’m witnessing the growth and
development of culture, more of a sideways slide than an uphill climb. The
feeling I’m having has little to do with Andrew Garfield, and even less to do
with his face.

Culture will eventually absorb what it at first does not broadly
accept or understand. As it absorbs and assimilates, it makes what previously looked unusual or outstanding into
something far more commonplace. Cell phones, interestingly, give an early,
obvious example of this assimilation in this century. The Motorola Dynatac
phones of the 1970s were unwieldy, strange beasts, seemingly more fit for
comedy than for daily use—remember Zack’s phone in “Saved by the Bell”? As time
passed, they were refined as their utility became more obvious and they began
to resemble more an object which might be put to use, rather than stared at or
envied. And now? Well, you might be reading this on a phone. Ditto for
computers: the earliest usage was purely academic, and their size and bulk made
them seem awkward, even potentially intimidating. (See Mad Men this week?) And yet, as time passed… In the arts, this sort of assimilation is more
rampant and simultaneously more insidious. Examples are everywhere. Take, to
pluck one random example, the career of R. Crumb. Crumb’s comics were, for
decades, many things: obscene, brilliant, earthy, soulful, sexist, misogynist,
complex, hilarious. His women waved their bloated, distended breasts high in
the air, simultaneously thrusting their bulbous posteriors out far beyond the
range of physics; his men, similarly, either thrust their hairy, wizened,
members upwards, or grasped them like there was no tomorrow, or both. In short,
not New Yorker material. And yet,
behold: his last New Yorker appearance
was less than 2 years ago, in September 2012. The Pixies, college-punk
favorites, hatched their sound in garages and bars in the Boston area after
meeting at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; though they achieved broad
popularity among the college-educated, possibly even Masters-Degree’d set,
their recent appearance on an iPhone commercial set off a small wave of what
seemed either to be a qualified pleasure or a modified horror among the band’s
longtime fans, somewhere between “That’s amazing” and “How could they do that
to my favorite band,” the idea being
that The Pixies’ raffish, loud, angry beauty was somehow being co-opted for a
suspicious cause, embraced by The Establishment. In film, take the career of
Christopher Nolan. If we compare early films like Following or the brave, intriguing and more watchable Memento with the most recent Batman
extravaganzas, it’s hard to believe the films were made by the same
filmmaker—and yet, they were. Somehow, big studios made him their own,
idiosyncratic warts and all. Do the new films have the inventiveness and
imagination of the old films? Sure. More money, more imagination. Do I miss the
Memento director? A little.

Which brings me to the matter of Andrew Garfield’s face,
popping up in magazines, on SNL, on talk shows, on movie posters—everywhere an
un-careful eye might chance to look. His performance in the first Red Riding TV film was remarkable; as a
young detective in the 1970s U.K., he managed to take a certain type of boyish
affectation characteristic of the period and change it into near-choreography,
even amidst fairly graphic and horrific inner and outer violence. And if I had
to explain why, while watching Never Let
Me Go, I was slumped in a sobbing heap in the corner of my over-large
theater seat, the most damning piece of evidence would be his devastating performance as a
young man who had held out hope for survival in a cannibalistic future society and then had it taken away from him bluntly and cruelly, leaving
him with no choice but, in a well-known moment from the film, to scream, loudly
and without restraint, into the cold night air. These were small films, in a
sense—they starred well-known actors, but their scope was local, they weren’t
blockbusters, they weren’t aimed at profit. They were aimed at simply doing a
good job at what they were trying to do, be it create a suspenseful crime story
or present an adaptation of Ishiguro’s nightmarish novel. I remember
wincing slightly when I learned he had been cast in The Social Network, not because I thought he would hurt the film—on
the contrary, his turn as Zuckerberg’s sidekick was beyond responsible—but
because I had a sinking feeling in my gut. Oh
no, I thought. They’ve come for him.
I thought I was the only one who noticed. Ah well… But maybe there’s hope? 

Enter the new Spider-Man films, stage left. The explosions.
The spider webs. The starlet love interest. The villains. The special effects.
The famous backstory. The famous suit. Here comes Culture: we can be sure that,
regardless of whatever roles Garfield might play in the future, many, many
viewers will know him primarily as Spider-Man. Culture spots the highly
personal performance, the nuanced approach to a role, the note of eccentricity,
and tries to bottle it as soon as possible—in this case, to give an affecting
insecurity to a famous character from a comic book. Whether the actor can climb
out from underneath the weight of Money and Prestige obtained through this
exchange is entirely up to the actor. Kate Winslet has given moving
performances in many films since Titanic,
but if pressed, more moviegoers would remember her for her role in the film
about a huge sinking ship than for her performance in Jude, sadly enough—or even more sadly, for her first film role, as
a murderous teen in Heavenly Creatures. Ditto
for Jake Gyllenhaal: you know him from Brokeback
Mountain, but do you also know him from Donnie
Darko, in which he played a far more insecure role? For which film did he
get broader recognition? And ditto for many others, a long list of the
absorbed.

Of course, at this point, it must be asked: who the heck do I think I am? Why am I
making vaguely resentful judgments about people I will never meet? And, above it all, isn’t
acting a job, e.g., that which supplies a pay-check—which must, in the case of
the more low-budget films mentioned above, have been quite small? And hopefully
I’m not pointing the Sell-Out Finger at these poor souls, am I? No, to the
last two questions. In fairness, though, I seek mainly to raise a question or two of
my own: will there be a time in American culture when the artistic work which
pays its practitioners the most, and in which premium investments are made,
matches that investment with like quality? Or must it always be the case that
that which attracts the masses in the greatest numbers must all-too-frequently
be of lesser quality due to the mercenary nature of its intent? And beyond
that, here are some other questions: how long does it take for Culture to move
on, to lose interest? Does the flavor of the month last for a whole month, or
is closer to a week? And, most importantly, if we accept that our cultural
world is an amoeba, absorbing particles of talent and enterprise into its bulk,
at what point will that amoeba begin to evolve?

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

There’s a moment, early on in Hateship Loveship–a new Liza Johnson film sensitively adapted by
Mark Poirier from a story by Canadian literary natural resource Alice Munro–where
Kristen Wiig kisses a mirror. When I say kisses, I suppose I mean more than
that: she really makes out with it. It’s an odd moment, one of many flickers of
oddness coming from Wiig in a film in which everything we know of Johanna
Parry, the habitual caregiver she plays, comes in flickers. And these minute
actions are all tinged with the same brand of socially-challenged peculiarity:
the way she wears her hair, the way she talks, certainly the way she dresses,
somewhere between frumpy and homely, perhaps just north of what they’re calling
“normcore” these days. Although I’m not the first to notice the scene, it
intrigues me, not least because it comes closest, of any juncture in the film,
to a breakout, of sorts, the sort of moment that can topple a movie if
ill-played, but is handled just delicately enough here to work, and near-perfectly.
Johanna has just had good news, or thinks she has: Ken, the estranged father of
Sabitha, the girl she’s traveled to Solon, Iowa to take care of (after her
previous client passed away, at the film’s beginning), seems to have some
romantic interest in Samantha, or so he says in his letters from Chicago, which
are actually written by Sabitha and her nasty-cute best friend, out of the sort
of random sourceless meanness from which stories ranging from A Clockwork Orange to Lord of the Flies to Heavenly Creatures were built. The
unknowing suitor is given sloppy grace here by Guy Pearce, not seemingly a
catch at first, but a man who gradually reveals something of himself—this is
indeed all we can say of him. This is too subtle a movie for a transformation of
Hollywood proportions to occur, as much as the film might try to do so by its
end, with its seemingly patched rifts; no one here changes, really, instead
gravitating towards positions of greater comfort with each other, which is all
we humans can do, 98 per cent of the time. At the moment in question, the make-out
scene with the mirror, we don’t expect anything of this kind to come from Johanna,
or from Wiig, really. It’s awkward when comedic actors play serious roles, a
bit like watching Olympic ice skating, waiting for the big stumble to come—will
it be this jump? Or that swerve? What will finally topple the athlete, destroy
her chances? And yet primarily comedic actors have put on serious clothes and
worn them well in the past: Robin Williams did it in The World According to Garp, and again in Insomnia; Will Ferrell did it in Everything Must Go and Winter
Passing, with likable but sad aplomb; Jennifer Aniston did it in The Good Girl, a film few saw but many
appreciated. Granted, for someone with Wiig’s past in improv theater, in which
everything rests upon one’s ability to portray grand things about a character
with telling economy, and in which such a spontaneous action, at the right
moment, could explode a scene outwards, or take it in a previously unforeseen
direction, the moment might not be such a stretch. Who knows if it was scripted,
unscripted…? Mirror scenes always carry with them a certain innate charge: from
Robert DeNiro’s famous moment of rhetorical self-interrogation in Taxi Driver to Jon Voight’s more benign
silent exchange with himself in Midnight
Cowboy, there’s always a bit of static when a mirror appears in a film, as
the lens looks at the lens looks at the lens. Usually, they indicate a moment of insecurity, whether it’s DeNiro’s attempts to bolster his courage with a succession of “You lookin’ at me”s or Jon Voight’s checking of his “look.” In this case, though, the moment is a declaration of self-love–if also an expression of cooped-up lust.  Whatever the case, the moment
forecasts everything that is to follow: Johanna’s trip to Chicago to clean up,
both literally and figuratively, poor Ken’s life, her romance with him, the attempted
repair of a family broken apart by a tragedy, a drunken driving accident which
killed Sabitha’s mother, leaving Sabitha under the unusually buttoned-up and
repressed watch of Mr. McCauley, Ken’s father-in-law, played here quite
modestly by Nick Nolte. And, as we watch these events unfold in quiet fashion,
with a soundtrack peppered with soft honky-tonk songs, we’re reminded that
there is room, indeed, in a medium in which stridency pays, literally and figuratively, for the “small” movie, whose strength grows from the
words people say or don’t say to each other, and the things they do, have done,
and will do. If one is able to look at one’s self in the mirror and then,
rather than turning away, plant a rather maudlin and exaggerated kiss, the kind
you’d only plant if no one else was there, what does that say, in particular,
about where one has arrived and where one might go? At the very least, it suggests that one has looked at one’s self and, rather than seeing its smallness, chosen to embrace its enormity.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

I’ll miss Harold Ramis’s presence in the world because no
one in my generation is getting any younger. Before you dismiss that sentence
as a tautology, I should explain. My generation can be roughly defined as those
born in or near 1970, growing up watching (read: worshiping) Saturday Night Live, SCTV, and other shows like them, and then finding
that comedies such as Caddyshack, Animal
House, and Ghostbusters are part
of their culture, their lives, and their minds, regardless of what supposed
intelligence they may, as viewers, presumably bring to the table—and then,
beyond that, finding that they are quite grateful to have Groundhog Day as part of their culture, and then, going even
farther, finding that they loved all of those films, and can’t conceive of replacements
for them, and can’t, as adults, readily explain why. But there is, in fact, a
reason: these movies, with which Harold Ramis was inextricably associated, in
either a large or small degree, stood for a set of comedic values which are no
longer with us.

What values? Well, these films had, as their calling card
and as a force which animated them, a sense of utter abandonment. To crassness.
To vulgarity. To spontaneity. To irreverence. Anything as openly vulgar and as
indulgent of objectification as Animal
House made these days would either not be noticed or would be placed under
a microscope so intense as to render its integrity as a whole utterly
unrecognizable. No one would dream of making a film as over-the-top as Ghostbusters, with its marshmallow man walking through Manhattan, today—unless it were attached to a franchise, of some sort.
The makers of these films weren’t trying to market anything: they simply wanted
to create an absurd situation and see where it led, to open things up as wide
as they possibly could. Ramis is an indelible part of their success because, as
the most gawky character in the room, he reminded us most strongly of
ourselves, sitting in the dark, living vicariously through others’ adventures
either ghostbusting or being slimed.

And, above and beyond that, these films were successful
executions of outrageous ideas, a harder task to accomplish than one might
think. Groundhog Day is a perfect
example. The story Ramis tells with this movie, that of daily reincarnation, is
a sophisticated one, but he presented it to us with the open-hearted brio of an
everyman filmmaker. The actors he chose, as well, from Murray to MacDowell to
even Elliot or Tobolowsky, are actors it’s hard, in a sense, to dislike—none of
them carried, at the time of filming, any special baggage, any notably
distasteful films in their history, that would have distracted from the
miraculousness of the story—they are wholly participating in the prolonged joke
of this movie, this project, the one they’re in right at that moment. And the
mood Ramis maintained throughout was consistently light—a lightness that
results in a subtlety one doesn’t find that often, an ease of laughter that
recalls much earlier films, even silent films. Is there mean-spirited humor in Groundhog Day? Sure, but it’s comedic
mean-spiritedness. No one’s bones, hearts, or lives are ever at risk of being broken,
though it might look that way: philosophical exercise rendered as comedy.

The cultural influences that produced the sort of comedy
Ramis participated in, wrote, and ultimately directed were very different from
those driving today’s comedies. The cultural legacy Ramis and his
contemporaries had was that of the 1960s and 1970s, eras heralded for their
freedoms and excesses but rarely examined as recovery from the social,
economic, and historical traumas of the 1950s and 1940s. The comedic films made
today are made in the shadow of a technological advancement that has rendered
our culture dispersed and distracted to the point of soullessness. Ramis is, in
a sense, a symbol of certain kind of
comedy: a comedy with a beginning, a middle and an end, all equally ridiculous,
all equally enjoyable, and all developed with the intention of fulfilling a
film’s full potential. Those kinds of comedies—comedies with a soul that you
can practically see—simply don’t exist anymore. Rest in peace.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

In large and small ways, the media confront us each day
with realities that are larger than we are, and yet rarely do these realities
touch us in any lasting way. Global warming, for example, is a crushing
problem, but most of us won’t be truly concerned about it until our homes are flooded
by overflowing oceans. War, and its daily presence in other cultures, most
certainly in the Middle East, is another one: we don’t think of what life
side-by-side with bombings, terrorism and other horrors must be like because we
never see the details of that life: the news, as reported, is an abstraction. Omar, the newest film from Hany Abu-Assad,
the director of the suicide-bomber story Paradise
Now among other films, brings the concept of life in a war-addled clime to viewers as anything but
an abstraction. The film draws its greatest strength from its smallest touches:
the way someone smiles, the way a love letter is folded, the small habits and
quirks an otherwise brutal person might possess. We watch those details,
absorb them, are fascinated by them. Then, when the larger-than-life world
intrudes, we are all the more horrified because we feel as if, in the
flickering way we might “know” a character in a film, we know the people bearing the brunt of the intrusion. 

It doesn’t hurt that the characters here are so personable,
and distinct from one another. In fact it makes the central love triangle in
the film, which is intertwined with the story of three freedom fighters whose working
bond ultimately erodes because of mutual suspicion, all the more wrenching. In
the opening, we watch Omar (Adam Bakri) climbing a city wall in occupied Palestine to see his love, Nadia
(Leem Lubany), the sister of Tarek (Eyad Hourani), one of Omar’s fellow fighters;
Omar is shot at, just as he clears the top. Omar’s path through the film
remains like this: rife with danger and the threat of either death or
imprisonment. The three young men—Tarek, Omar, and Abjan (Samer Bisharat), the
clown of the trio (and also in love with Nadia)—interact with great ease. Their
banter is so spontaneous and funny at times, like electrified small talk, that
it rings Tarantino-esque, even as its backdrop is horrific. Not twenty minutes
into this film, Omar is arrested and imprisoned. His chief questioner, Agent
Rami, is a menace, though you wouldn’t think it. He’s full of humanizing little
gestures, like a nervous consumption of Tic-Tacs. Waleed Zuaiter’s performance
projects a relaxation hiding a more tense, complex spirit—and a deep desire to
get information out of Omar about his operations. Their dialogue has a mood
we’ve seen before, in other films, ranging from Pacino and DeNiro’s interchange
in Heat to Denzel Washington’s prison
interrogation room banter with Russell Crowe’s detective in American Criminal:
predator and prey, circling around each other, pretending otherwise. The
comparison to American suspense movies goes farther, indeed, as there is
something near-breathless about the film’s pace—Omar is a fast runner, but he
seems even faster here because you know what he’s running from. The torture
scenes are unmitigated, as are the scenes in Omar’s cell, where, again, details
take over. Lying still after a long beating, Omar sees a small bug crawling
across the floor. Suddenly he, and we, pay far more attention to that bug than
we might normally, as the camera moves in on it: the bug, in fact, becomes a
metaphor for any number of things. A feeling of humiliation. A sense of
powerlessness. A quality of innocence. At one point, Omar whispers to the
small, green bug: “It will be okay,” summoning hope from who knows what
quarter.

The love story between Omar and Nadia doesn’t really get
happier as it goes along. It starts so sweetly, with Nadia bringing the three
cohorts tea, slipping a note for Omar under his cup, and telling Abjan she
won’t serve him until he imitates Marlon Brando, in a small, Tarantino-esque
move. (Abjan only makes a few sounds, but he does a good job.) The notes Omar
and Nadia pass each other are, yes, an old-fashioned trope, but the clash of
the gesture’s innocence with a violence-drenched backdrop sends out static
sparks. They tell each other little stories in their notes, and speak lyrically
and expansively, the way people do when they first fall in love. Unfortunately,
when the “real world” crashes into their love, all innocence ends. Omar is
placed in prison several times over the course of the film; with each sentence,
his comrades’ suspicion increases that he is informing on them. Also, his love
becomes more complicated with each departure as Nadia’s interest shifts to
Abjan. The love triangle eventually collapses, as one would suspect it would,
and the film milks poignancy from that collapse. There’s no melodrama, here,
very little screaming or fighting. As with the rest of the film, what we notice
are the nuances, such as Nadia’s whispered “okay” when her father asks her if
she will accept her suitor’s hand in marriage, as if he were asking her to pass
a plate of food. The dissolution of love is not the only sad news this movie
brings us—although the other news is delivered with a similarly devastating
lack of fanfare.

It would be enough for Omar
to be a successful action film set in a politically fraught part of the world.
It would also suffice for it be a well-told and tastefully handled love story.
But this film manages to mix and blend the two with tremendous grace. And, more
importantly, it puts a human face on events which are perpetually changing
history but which remain un-absorbed until they are at our doorstep, knocking,
and then entering unasked.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

Philip Seymour Hoffman lived very close to us, in Manhattan. He was very visible in the neighborhood, riding his (old) bike, walking with his children, or sitting at a café, either murmuring to a companion while simultaneously filling a room or looking out from a table, alone, as if he belonged in that spot. I would always do an inner double take when I saw him in person. The first take would be to marvel at how relaxed he seemed, how comfortable in his skin, what a man-of-the-people mood he seemed to have about him. And the second take would be to think, my god, I just walked past one of the most intense, malleable, transformable American actors alive today, and I didn’t have to seek him out, didn’t have to stalk him: he was right in front of me. And as I watched more and more of his films, and simultaneously had the experience of passing him on the street, it occurred to me that the quality I was identifying as relaxedness might in fact be readiness: readiness to launch himself into a role, a situation, a life choice that would be dynamic, shocking, not pleasant to watch unfolding, but memorable, all the same, if memorable is an adequate word to use for his performances.

When great actors die as Hoffman did, revealing staggering addictions, or psyches run ragged because some unspecified demon is chasing them, the question always becomes: did the role become the person, or did the person become the role, or both? When Heath Ledger died similarly, Jack Nicholson was quoted as saying, “I warned him,” about the Ambien use that resulted from playing the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight—one must assume that playing the same character in Tim Burton’s version of the story did a number on Nicholson as well. We could speculate a long time about to what extent actors can be said to “choose” their roles, but we can say, with some certainty, that if you’re validated by your work, then the roles you play begin to form a house you inhabit, shaped to your specifications. Hoffman’s turn as Freddie Miles in The Talented Mr. Ripley, his soft tones evidence of a poisonous mix of wealth and reckless immorality, would form one beam of the house; his
plaintive turn as Scotty J. in Boogie Nights, kissing up with futility to the cuter and better-equipped Dirk Diggler, would form another beam; the personification of sensitivity, intelligence, insidiousness, and self-absorption that was his performance of the title role in Capote would form another beam; his grand but pitiful presence in The Master would form another; and on it goes. The roles he played had in common a sense of uncomfortable intensity, as if there were an oblong, burning form lodged somewhere inside him that he bore patiently, but not without unhappiness that drove everything he did—even at his most relaxed moments on screen, he seemed badly in need of psychic fresh air.

And that’s why we watched Hoffman. And that’s why, with each film, our expectations of him grew. America’s love of its stars and its celebrities is very closely linked to its culture of expectation. From the smallest arenas to the largest, we have expectations. We want our children to over-perform, to impress us; we want each other to constantly succeed, to constantly out-do, over-achieve; and we want our celebrities to be, in a sense, like gods. We don’t want them to grow old. We don’t want them to stumble from grace. And, most of all, we don’t want them to be human. And so, when an actor like Hoffman, possessed of such a great talent along with the inner complexity necessary
to display that talent to its fullest, reveals himself, at the latest count, to have had at least eight empty bags of heroin in his apartment at time of death, we’re
stunned, and shocked, and we remark on the great tragedy of the moment, and
we’re correct to do so. It is tragic. But the significance of such an event should also be to remind us that we’re all human beings, and that part of our expectation, of our celebrities and ourselves, is that we will be just this: beautiful and imperfect, imperfect and beautiful, two qualities which will strive against each other so valiantly that you might mistakenly think one quality might be victorious.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.