Second chance

State and Main

(2000)

So Anthony Lane, in an elegy for Phillip Seymour Hoffman in this week's New Yorker, mentioned Todd Solondz's Happiness, where Hoffman plays a sad obscene-phone-calling masturbator, as a performance that his fans might not want to include in a retrospective.

I disagree, and Happiness is precisely what I would have watched tonight, except that it runs more than 2 hours, and I have an Illini basketball game coming up at 8. I was set to go with The Big Lebowski, but while Hoffman's role there is memorable (Lane singles it out), it is small, and I wanted more.

Ah, I thought--another look as Syncdoche, New York, where he gets a rare lead. But as I was reaching for that, I saw this, just a few slots over, and that was that: it's fair to say that this is Hoffman's only romantic lead in a screwballish comedy, it may be his most straightforwardly engaging role, and it's probably also the film he's in (it's too much an ensemble piece--and too much a Mamet piece--for me to call it "his film") that I love the most.

Oh, but here's something I don't know why I never noticed before: the dry-erase board mishap that sets in motion the confusion about dinner at the mayor's? It's either a huge Mametian joke (probably) or the sloppiest series of continuity errors imaginable. Watch that space closely.