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| Title: HOFFMAN Year: 1970 Rating: *** |
In the deliberately bizarre, stage-play-like, counter-culture-era HOFFMAN, Peter Sellers portrays the titular character with similarities to two roles, both ten years apart, before and after...
The first, before, is his serious-mode villain/criminal from John Guillerman's kitchen-sink-noir NEVER LET GO in which he menaces teenage blonde Carol White, abusively kept in a formidably lavish lair... and then his penultimate Oscar-nominated BEING THERE as an endearingly offbeat nobody...
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| Peter Sellers and Sinéad Cusack in HOFFMAN |
As HOFFMAN introduces another hot young vulnerable blonde, Sinéad Cusack, who (as learned through random bouts of exposition dialogue) he's blackmailing into spending the weekend with him...
Turns out she's a secretary at his large firm, where her boyfriend (Jeremy Bulloch) also worked and had attempted some kind of crime... and Sellers' creepy rich-guy persona subtly morphs into a kind of neurotic and tortured soul, as she pieces together what's behind his particular brand of darkly existential loneliness...
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| Sinéad Cusack in HOFFMAN |
A tables-turning process within limited settings, from sporadic dinner/walking-in-the-park breaks to the fancily claustrophobic apartment interior, particularly the bedroom...
Where surprisingly, very little happens... not what the audience or the girl awkwardly expects... and it's mostly Cusack providing the anticipatory dramatic tension, with deer-in-headlight expressions etched across sad blue eyes: sometimes even making her seem a little older, more experienced...
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| Peter Sellers in HOFFMAN |
Sellers also turns in an effective dramatic turn, not surprising given he's usually comfortable in roles where he's uncomfortable in his own skin, and, by the end, he's even more of a victim than she is (for even in the supposedly progressive late-1960's/early-1970's, it was still a man's world)...
Overall there needed more of a suspenseful edge in what's basically a low-budget British crime flick lurking beneath all the askew art-house banter... and without experiencing exactly how and why she wound up in such a precarious situation (inspiring HONEYMOON IN VEGAS and INDECENT PROPOSAL), it's impossible to completely understand what's really behind Sellers' unique ambiguity: ultimately making his character seem more written than real — with the poor girl basically stuck in-between.
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| Sinéad Cusack in HOFFMAN |
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| Sinéad Cusack in HOFFMAN |
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| Jeremy Bulloch in HOFFMAN |
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| Sinéad Cusack in HOFFMAN |
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| Peter Sellers and Sinéad Cusack in HOFFMAN |
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| Sinéad Cusack in HOFFMAN |
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Jeremy Bulloch in HOFFMAN with David Lodge
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