He's in the boiler room, pinned on his back. Philip Seymour Hoffman is 13 years old, just over five feet tall and losing a wrestling match, badly. This being wrestling, lowest in the hierarchy of school sports and chronically underfunded, matches take place in the bowels of buildings and the onlookers, mostly parents, are forced to sit on the cold floor, close by. There his mother is watching him fail. Suddenly she scrambles to her hands and knees on the corner of the mat, looks him dead in the eye and cries, "Get up, get up," pounding her fists on the floor for emphasis. He glares back at her. "I can't! I can't!" he screams.
This is a story that Hoffman, arguably the world's finest actor, tells about himself to maintain perspective. His latest film, Capote, is garnering all kinds of accolades: The best movie about journalism ever made. The most emotionally taut portrait of an artist overcome by ambition ever drawn. That's just for the movie.
The real praise has been lavished on Hoffman's psychologically luminous performance, as it has since his 1992 appearance in Scent of a Woman. "Naked as a newborn baby, utterly lacking in vanity, his performances delve into areas of the psyche most actors don't even know exist, let alone have the daring to tackle," critic James Mottram raved in The Scotsman. "He's an actor's actor, really fearless," observes John C. Reilly, who has costarred with Hoffman in films and on stage.
In real life, Hoffman is a large, burly man with a husky voice, yet somehow, he persuasively melts into Capote, a hermaphroditic elf in bespoke suits who captivates despite a voice that has all the gravitas of a kazoo. Even more remarkably, Hoffman conveys the transformation of the writer from person to persona during the six years he wrote In Cold Blood, the true story of a family murdered in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, and a masterpiece that made nonficton as literary as fiction. A Southerner, unmistakably homosexual and seductive to his very marrow, Capote thrived as the consummate New York raconteur. But he also managed to endear himself to the buttoned-up Kansans, the detectives and especially the two men who were eventually executed for the murders.
Confronted with the reports I've gathered of his genius, Hoffman shares with me the story of losing the wrestling match in front of his mom. "It doesn't matter how brilliant or wonderful I think I am. On any given day, no matter how hard I fight, there is somebody who can take me down. I can fail in front of my peers. I can fail in front of my parent. I just have a certain understanding that I am only as good as yesterday when it comes to what I do for a living."
Hoffman does not rely on his talent to carry him through a role. He spent five and a half months transmuting himself into Capote. Much of the time was spent alone, in a room with the door locked, reading. He studied archival footage of the writer plying his increasingly alcohol-sodden charms on late-night talk shows. He lost 40 pounds and practiced the inscrutable voice and fey mannerisms for an hour or two every day. He consulted old friends and acquaintances of Capote, including the late photographer Richard Avedon, and walked the streets of New York with headphones replaying Capote's interviews with his biographer Gerald Clarke. Like a classical musician practicing scales, learning a piece measure by measure so as to have only to breathe soul into the music onstage, Hoffman prepares not to play, but to vivify, a character.
Despite such preparation, Hoffman suffers from as much anxiety before a performance as sixth graders in the final round of a national spelling bee. Capote director Bennett Miller, who has been friends with the actor since they were both 16, remembers receiving phone calls laden with self-doubt in the days before Hoffman opened on Broadway in Sam Shepard's True West and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. "He works himself into states of crisis and distress, worrying that people are going to know he is a fraud and that his career is over," Miller says. Hoffman won Tony nominations for both roles.
Preparation takes very deep levels of concentration, a process that Hoffman describes as "lugging weights upstairs with your brain." It's not a fun time to be around him, reports Dan Futterman, longtime friend and Capote screenwriter. "Whatever he is going through it's painful, it's private, and he does not want to be disturbed." For Hoffman, acting is taxing, demanding and isolating. In preparation for Capote, he "went through profound levels of self-criticism and self-judgment because ultimately I felt that I always had it wrong."
It's the capacity for self-criticism that makes Hoffman such a contender. Artists who sacrifice self-criticism to bask in reports of their gathering greatness are at risk of destroying the very edge that makes their work penetrating. Such was the case with Capote himself, and the film's power rests completely on Hoffman's ability to illuminate the subtleties of such self-treachery—and renders his role resonant for our narcissistic times.
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