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Since he burst onto the scene in The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman has been one of the most durable and unlikely Hollywood stars. With his height at a generous 5'6" and not possessing what anybody would have imagined as "movie star looks", Dusty has been one of the most respected and successful actors of his generation, moving from comedy to drama and just about everything in between. Among his many accolades are two Best Actor Oscars (in seven nominations thus far), an Emmy, five Golden Globes, and the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. He has a reputation for being a pain-in-the-ass on the set, but apparently it has payed off, as when you look back over his long filmography it has more good films than lousy, and many are absolute classics.
The Graduate (1967) is often credited as being one of the first Hollywood films to tap into the Baby Boomer zeitgeist and present some of the uneasiness of the era that would explode just a year later in 1968. And while that is true and it will always be an interesting document very much of the times, I think the overall film is timeless, and the story of Benjamin Braddock is just as compelling and funny and relateable today as it was coming up on forty years ago. The screenplay and Mike Nichols' exuberant direction are top-notch, the Simon & Garfunkle on the soundtrack don't hurt none, and the main themes of alienation and the awkward transition into true adulthood ring true. But the enduring appeal of the movie will always be anchored to the performances of Anne Bancroft and Hoffman. Even a casual film fan will probably know the part of Ben was originally written to be a more stereotypical Southern Californian, like Robert Redford. Casting Hoffman totally against that idea was genius, and breathed a whole other layer into the film...as well as giving the cinema a new star.
But as popular and acclaimed as The Graduate was, had Hoffman been lazy and tried to keep that image of himself alive on screen, he may well have burned out within a few years and been little more than a trivia question today. His next major film was Midnight Cowboy (1969), where Hoffman's role as the ailing street scum Ratzo Rizzo is a completely different direction from Ben Braddock, and Dustin turned in another great performance. It's a tricky part, filled with histrionics that could have easily overwhelmed an actor, but he manages to play him broadly yet still show the humanity underneath. By the time he and Jon Voight's Joe Buck board that bus for Florida and the Harry Nilsson comes up on the soundtrack, you truly care about the fate of Enrico Salvatore Rizzo. Midnight Cowboy is even more of its time than The Graduate, but it's a powerful film that still holds up, and Hoffman's work is impressive as Hell. In only two films he was already showing off his range and refusing to be typecast or dismissed as an actor.
Throughout the decade of the 1970s, Hoffman continued to show his range and prove he had an eye for good projects. He wasn't infallible, and not all of them reached the level of Pop Culture saturation and importance of The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy, but they were mostly challenges and mostly triumphs of some kind.
The satirical Little Big Man (1970) is one of my all-time favorite films, Western or otherwise. Jack Crabb, the lone White survivor of Custer's Last Stand, is a great role for Dustin, aging on screen from a teenager to the 121-year-old man who tells us his story. Crabb meets all sorts of people on his adventures through the American frontier after his family and their wagon train are slaughtered by Indians, from religious zelots to hucksters to Wild Bill Hickock to General George Armstrong Custer, Crabb moves through this period of myth and history. But the most crucial time spent is with the Cheyenne tribe, who raise him as one of their own. I think Hollywood has still not presented a more human, honest, spirited portrait of Native Americans, especially as embodied by the great Cheif Dan George as Old Lodgeskins, the tribe's leader and Cobb's adopted grandfather. Amazing film, and Hoffman is wonderful leading the audience through the amusing ups and tragic downs of this farce mixed perfectly with very serious social commentary.
After that came one of his few blunders, the painful Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971). An incongruous attempt at melding radical ideas and comedy in an altered state of distorted realities, it's a mess of a movie. Hoffman managed a couple good moments as a recording super star going mad, but the movie is a miss, plain and simple. Hardcore music fans of that era will enjoy Shel Silverstein's music and the brief moment Shel, Hoffman and Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show share a stage, but if you want to see the very definition of a badly "dated" movie, track down this flick.
However, also released that same year was Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), where Hoffman again chose a completely different kind of character than he had played before...and once again, he pulls it off seamlessly. Straw Dogs is the story of a mild-mannered American, David Sumner, who returns with his wife to her rural English hometown, assuming the pastoral vistas and quaint inhabitants will give him peace and quite to work. Events progress to the point where by the end of the picture, the meek David must defend his home and wife quite literally to the death. And being Peckinpah, you can bet that death is going to be brutal and bloody. The progression from Braddock to Ratzo to Crabb to Sumner would have been impressive if it had happened over a career of two decades, but this was all in the first FIVE YEARS, right out of the gate.
The next five years brought even more successes in the gritty Devil's Island epic Papillon (1973) with Steve McQueen, starring in the title role in Bob Fosse's 1974 tragic biopic of controversial comic Lenny Bruce, real-life Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein to Redford's Bob Woodward in the excellent recounting of breaking the Watergate scandal in All the President's Men (1976), and a graduate student accidentally caught up in dangerous international intrigue involving Sir Larry Olivier's sadistic ex-Nazi, stolen diamonds, and dentistry gone awry in the thriller Marathon Man (1976).
One of my absolute favorite Hoffman performances came in another '70s classic, but this one seems to have been a bit lost in the shuffle over time. In Straight Time (1978 - Ulu Grosbard), Dustin is Max Dembo, who as the film opens we learn is a career thief just being released from prison after serving six years for burglary. He seems willing to go legit for once in his life, and after meeting a pretty young girl at the employment office, his holding down a square job and wanting for nothing more than someone to love looks as though it may even be attainable. But his sadistic and petty P.O. hassles and busts him again for next to nothing, and Max descends very quickly back to a life of crime. Although unlike his past crime sprees, this string is tinged with desperation, because now he has something to live for. Great character study, one of Hoffman's most controlled and low-key performances, and he's very convincing in this tale of a low-level scumbag. It's too bad Straight Time isn't more widely available and often discussed, because it's a damn good film. I gather at the time Hoffman's character was seen as much too unsympathetic, and it never enjoyed much critical or financial success even then. Oh, well.
Hoffman actually intended it to be his directorial debut, but a few days in he realized the acting part of the job was more important to him, and he called in his friend Ulu Grosbard to take over.
The very next year saw a return to incredible mainstream success with Kramer vs. Kramer (1979 - Robert Benton). As one of the first films to deal with the expanding issue of divorce in America, it seems more than a bit silly that the mother is cast as the irresponsible heavy and daddy the triumphant and sensitive hero, but this is a Hollywood film, and who do you think runs the place (especially in 1979) but a bunch of divorced men. But putting all that aside for a moment, Hoffman is extremely appealing as Ted Kramer, a busy and successful advertising executive who's world is shaken up when his wife leaves one evening...but doesn't take their young son with her. This forces the two men of the house to finally discover each other, and for Ted to rearrange his priorities in a hurry. When Mom (played by Meryl Streep) comes back in the picture months later and wants custody, it turns into a tear-jerker where the system can't acknowledge a father is potentially just as good or better a parent than a mother. What makes the movie work are not the dramatics, but Hoffman and little Justin Henry's performances.
Kind of ironically after over a decade of varied and challenging performances and three previous nominations (The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy and Lenny), Hoffman finally wins his Oscar, in a role that is much more ordinary than much of the work that came before it. Not that Dustin isn't very good and very compelling in Kramer vs. Kramer, it's just that the material isn't anywhere as radical or inherently interesting as some of his other work. But then, I guess it shouldn't be surprising that the Academy honored him for it, after all.
After working feverishly since 1967, in the '80s Hoffman took much more time selecting projects and has only four theatrical releases for the entire decade. But two of them are damned impressive. Tootsie (1982 - Sydney Pollack) is a crowd pleaser of a comedy about an actor named Michael Dorsey who decides to disguise himself as a woman, Dorothy Michaels, in order to get work. Very amusing stuff throughout, and written with much more depth than just a string of jokes about a man in drag, but if Hoffman wasn't able to bring a level of credibility to Dorothy, the movie would have crashed and burned no matter how intelligent the script or deft the co-stars. Once again, Hoffman was more than up to the challenge. He also should be commended for making fun of himself. The opening part of the film has the character he plays unable to find employment anymore on the stage or even, as his agent has to tell him (played perfectly by the film's director Pollack), in television commercials. He is too temperamental and picky about the craft for anyone to want the hassle of dealing with him. This was, and still is, Hoffman's reputation. That he skewered himself in Tootsie is very endearing to me. It's quite easy to imagine that if the break of The Graduate hadn't come and Hoffman stayed in New York that he might well have become Michael Dorsey.
By the way, as a sidenote to Hoffman's being difficult, Elmore Leonard's novel Get Shorty was inspired by his frustration in dealing with Dustin on a project (that was never ultimately produced). The self-obsessed jerk of a movie star character Martin Weir (played by Danny DeVito in the film) is based on Hoffman.
After Tootsie came a television project, where Hoffman starred in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" (made-for-TV 1985 - Volker Schlöndorff). Dustin is fantastic as Willy Loman, and the work rightfully earned him an Emmy. The next endeavor is a flop of almost epic proportions, and just the mention of the title is still a punchline in the industry: Ishtar (1987 - Elaine May). Co-starring Warren Beatty, he and Hoffman play Z-grade lounge singers without a single ounce of talent or wit between 'em who in a very convoluted turn of plotting wind up as patsys for the government in a Middle Eastern country. Ishtar was known as a flop before it even hit screens, as the budget spiraled way out of control, and the resulting film when it finally hit screens was greeted with critical jeers and audience indifference. Ishtar is not a good movie...but to be fair, if you give it half a chance, it isn't a disaster either. The deadpan sincerity that Hoffman and Beatty commit to as these two losers is fitfully amusing, Charles Grodin is actually quite funny in his supporting role, Isabelle Adjani is always easy on the eyes, and while this attempt to update the Hope & Crosby road movies doesn't really come off, it is watchable with some decent moments. If you had no idea it was supposed to be "one of the worst films ever made", you wouldn't have guessed it. Nor, after seeing it, will you have any idea where all the money went. But again, give it a shot sometime, it has its moments.
But the stink of that was washed right off of Hoffman with his next movie, playing an Autistic man reunited with his brother on a country-long road trip in Rain Man (1988 - Barry Levinson). Dusty would win his second Best Actor Oscar this time, in a performance that could have all-too easily slipped into hollow parody and naked thespian machinations. Helped immeasurably by the presence of Tom Cruise doing some of his very best work, Raymond Babbit is a character you can't forget, and every new generation that watches it falls in love with the guy all over again. Very endearing performance. The '80s finished with the disappointing Family Business (1989), which despite the star power of Hoffman, Sean Connery and Mathew Broderick in a caper film directed by Sidney Lumet, it all falls flat, flat, flat. Watchable, but you can't get over feeling there was a great movie somewhere in all this.
From the '90s to today, he has continued to work, some of it good, some of it bad. In the past decade he has become almost exclusively a supporting player, but just about always his performance is one of the best things about the flick in question. I really love his re-teaming with Levinson again for Wag the Dog (1997), as well as David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees (2004) from last year, and I think Moonlight Mile (2002) and the Mamet adaptation American Buffalo (1996) deserved better fates than they got, box offixce wise. But even the silly turn Hoffman took toward the action genre in Outbreak (1995) is fun and fine, for what it is ("Have you seen this monkey?!?"). I am encouraged by Huckabees, especially, that he still has a few masterpieces left in him (Meet the Fockers, be damned) and wouldn't be at all surprised if he got his third and even fourth Oscars in the coming years.
Extremely unlikely that a man who looks like Dustin Hoffman could have made such a career for himself, but he's a damn good actor, and forever an interesting screen presence.
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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra
"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra
Last edited by Holden Pike; 07-24-14 at 01:07 PM.
Reason: repairing busted image links
