2Young2Die

  I just saw Philip Seymour Hoffman’s posthumous last film, “A Most Wanted Man.” And maybe it’s too easy to say in retrospect but it was like watching a man on a suicide mission, chain-smoking, wheezing, overweight, rarely making eye contact with the camera as if he was embarrassed. (Yes, it’s an internal performance, but still.) No question he’s the most soulful of actors with a kind of sweet/tragic beauty but in this movie he just seems ill. Watching Hoffman was, for me, like a recent viewing of “The Misfits,” the last film for Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable (an unlikely romantic couple, Gable 59 and looking 65; Monroe 33 looking 40), though Monroe had once fantasized Gable was her father. Still beautiful though bloated, bad-wigged, boozy and sometimes dazed, Monroe’s is a brave performance but difficult to watch, almost too naked and revealing. I mentioned this to Joyce Carol Oates, who didn’t agree that Marilyn … Read more