"A Most Wanted Man sports the last important performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s career, and it’s also my choice for the best male performance of the year. I’msure most of us are sad due to the passing of this wonderful actor, but at the same timeI must clarify that I genuinely think that his is the best performance from a male actor that I saw last year.
"Hoffman plays Gunther, the chief of a parallel spy organization in Germany that handles with possible terrorist threats. We feel his experience, the weight of years of doing his job in the proper manner. In this film Hoffman is constantly being harassed by powerful people into finding a solution to the problem in which the film bases its plot, and we see him calmly dismissing it, addressing it, doing whatever is needed so he can do his job, the thing that he knows he has to do.
"It is in that tension that Hoffman finds the strength to give us a troubled character thatwe see, almost at times too literally, bottled up in his feelings. We don’t get to know much about Gunther, at least not from him or those around him, but we can feel it in his face, his shoulders, the constant tired posture when walking or sitting down.
"The moment that sells the performance and marks this as one of the most powerful and underrated performances of the year is the ending. We can’t understand the character and the performance of Hoffman without this ending, we can’t have the eternal contraction of this character without the final explosion. His final 'FUCK.'
"Hoffman, in that way, was a master in terms of how his characters always seemed to bottle up feelings, they seem normal, until they start breaking apart. His character in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), when the older brother after slowly building up, finally explodes in a burst of violence, bloodshed and creative cursing thatmakes up for, maybe, one of the most jarring performances of his career and specially hurting seen in the light of his demise.
"His work with Paul Thomas Anderson is something to be marveled at, he follows a similar pattern of withheld emotions and sudden bursts of violence and explosive insults that feel somewhat akin to the quiet character that they try to show to the outside. It is evident that beneath the goodness or good ‘public relations’ of his characters in Punch Drunk Love (2003) and The Master (2012) (winner of Best Supporting Actor in the Muriels that year) are a façade of something much more sinister, more evil and strong.
"Much more stronger than the fragile characters in the other two P.T. Anderson films, but that still follow the same kind of performance, the same contraction and release, as present in the ‘I’m an idiot’ scene in Boogie Nights (1997) and the breaking down of Phil Parma in what is maybe my personal favorite performance in Magnolia (1999), where the weak and at the same time personally involved nurse finds a way to fight his own demons, his own problems with his self, his family and his personal history, through the pains and failures of those around him.
"Everyone has their favorite Hoffman performance, and I’m not someone to just ruin others experiences, to taint the view of the rest of those who most surely loved his work and also loved the man, as we grew under the always shining moments of his talent. I’m not the one to tell you which performances are great and which are the onesthat deserved more love, anyone can write that, and I’m not going to be the one to judge and preserve a memory (my memory) of such a tremendous actor in front of you.
"My opinion doesn’t matter, not in the (even now still hurtful) wake of the demise of one of the greatest actors of his generation, but the memories that he, a friend as I like to call those who make me feel more than anyone else, left in me. I’m just going to put my favorite moment of his career down here, and I wish you could all write and share your best/favorite bits. It doesn’t have to be his still wonderful Oscar winning performance for Capote (2005), or anything that remotely deserves any kind of praise, it has to be what you’ll remember. And here’s what I want to remember today:
~ Jaime Grijalba
“The performance of a lifetime….”
"An expression often used by agents and/or studio execs to drum up some Oscar buzz. It’s also a prime example of the type of cliché ridden and lazy copy that’s churned out by many mass media outlets dabbling in film culture on a regular basis. In fact 'performance of a lifetime,' is one of those expressions that is rarely (and I stress rarely) used in an instance where it’s ever anything more than a bunch of verbose fluff.
"Consider now, Gary “G-Daawg” Poulter as Wade in David Gordon Green’s welcome return to dramatic form, Joe. Is there really any other suitable description we could apply to such a performance? Poulter was an actual homeless man discovered by Green and his team during a hunt for colorful local street folk. Green often gravitates to non-professionals for his supporting cast as they add truth to his naturalistic approach to filmmaking. With Poulter however, Green found something more than a cameo player, and within minutes of seeing the test footage, he knew he had found one of the leads for his film.
"Green worked closely with Poulter, who in addition to his homeless status, struggled with severe alcoholism and its debilitating health effects. The level of commitment required from him in the role of lead villain, as an abusive cretin of a father, was a gamble the film’s budget simply couldn’t afford to see come up short. The gamble paid off and the effect of the production on Poulter’s mental health was something of a cathartic experience for the man.
"Poulter’s blood and tears are on that screen. One can imagine he did a lot of soul searching and personal reflection with his very honest portrayal of Wade. A first time actor, with only a single screen credit to his name, Poulter steals scene after scene from the Academy Award winning Nicolas Cage. His was easily the best performance in in the film. It was the performance of a lifetime… literally, a performance both drawing from his life and cruelly mirroring it.
"Sadly, shortly after shooting Gary Poulter was found dead by local police, the apparent victim of drowning following an alcoholic seizure. He never saw the finished film, nor heard that he had already landed a subsequent role. He was still living on the street. He was 53 years old." ~ Adam Lemke
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