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Dustin Hoffman is a great actor. For sure. No doubt.
The Graduate? Great movie. Midnight Cowboy? Great movie. All the President's Men? Great movie. Kramer vs. Kramer? Great movie. Tootsie? Great movie. Rain Man? So-so movie. But he's great in it. "Wapner...got to get home for Wapner." Ha! Great!
And that brings us up to Dustin Hoffman's career circa 1989.
Fast-forward to fall 2003, and as surely as the leaves are tumbling and the sun is slinking lower in the sky, we can welcome the arrival of a Dustin Hoffman Movie We Don't Want To See. This year, it's Runaway Jury. Last year, it was Moonlight Mile. Before that, it was Sphere...Mad City...Sleepers....Outbreak...Billy Bathgate...Hook...
Family Business.
In fact, can you remember the last time you wanted to see a Dustin Hoffman movie? Do you even care to see Dustin Hoffman onscreen ever again?
The 1970s produced four male acting titans: Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino. (Not to mention the underrated and overlooked Robert Duvall, who is to Pacino, De Niro, and Hoffman as John Steinbeck is to Hemingway, Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.)
Pacino's turned into something of a screaming mimi, though he's always fun to watch and he still has great performances in him, as he proved in Insomnia and Glengarry Glen Ross. De Niro now basically coasts on a half-assed but well-executed imitation of his younger self. Hackman stars in thirty-six movies a year, the occasional one of which is actually great, such as Unforgiven and The Royal Tenenbaums, and the rest of which are Runaway Jury.
Dustin Hoffman, for his part, stars in Runaway Jury.
The weird thing is that Hoffman seems to have just sort of given up. At a certain point, right after Rain Man, his résumé drops off a cliff. And we're not even going to bring up the famous flopgasm that was Ishtar. Compared to his work in the 1990s, Ishtar was a triumph.
The last movie he made that even had a chance to be good was American Buffalo in 1996. And he did a nice job with his Robert Evans send-up in Wag the Dog. He even bagged an Oscar nomination (!) for it, even though the film was so slight and the part so brief that it felt more like a glorified cameo.
That's it. Nearly fifteen years worth of career equals one movie that could have been good, one nice comic cameo, and a whole lot of Mad City.
Where did it all go wrong? First of all, we have no clue who thought Hoffman would make a good action hero, but we can't imagine anyone, anywhere, clamouring to see him running around fighting menaces with a glass visor over his face, as he did in both Outbreak and Sphere.
Secondly, we wonder if he even reads the scripts that get FedExed over by his agent, and if so, why he keeps picking all the stinkers. He must get a few good offers, right? Did Mad City seem like a fresh social commentary on the page? Did he take the part to fulfill a lifelong dream of sharing the screen with John Travolta?
It's pointless to speculate why actors do what they do -- good intentions gone awry, projects gone off the rails, multiple alimony payments piling up, whatever. All we know is that not only do we not get excited for Dustin Hoffman movies -- we actively avoid them. And that makes us sad, because he's arguably made more great movies and delivered more great performances -- and of a wider variety -- than De Niro, Hackman, or Pacino. Yet we'll gladly run out to any of their movies, as long as they don't have the words "Rocky" and/or "Bullwinkle" in the title.
Hoffman, not so much.
It's gotten so bad that for one, disorienting moment we actually thought it was Hoffman that starred in Mrs. Doubtfire.
And it didn't sound so far off from the truth.
Ouch.
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