“When you smoke, you think,” said Philip Seymour Hoffman in a 2002 interview with The Believer. “It’s a pleasurable thing, and not a duty.”
I think about this observation whenever I go on YouTube and watch this bit from Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 psychodrama, The Master—a bit that didn’t make it into the final cut and in which Hoffman effectively plays himself. There’s something perverse about this being my favorite PSH scene ever, I know. Considering that Hoffman was arguably (probably? definitely?) the greatest American movie actor of the 21st century—the most consistent, the most versatile, the most likely to hold up his end of the bargain, whether trudging through a Sundance indie or gleefully torturing Tom Cruise in close-up—surely there’s a better passage to illustrate his brilliance than one where he fails to hold it together, where the stamina and concentration that made him a legend onstage break. And yet.
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