Philip Baker Hall Ruled “The Territory of Older, Troubled Men”

In 2006, writing one of his customarily lacking-in-self-awareness missives in Vanity Fair, editor-in-chief Graydon Carter told of an encounter with Philip Seymour Hoffman, “a terribly serious young man.” Carter told Hoffman, whose 2005 work in the title role of Capote had been widely celebrated, that he, Carter, did “a pretty mean Truman Capote” himself, and then proceeded to lisp. “[Hoffman] gave me a pissed-off look and just walked away,” Carter recalled, because of course he did. 

Among the many sins Carter committed in that encounter the most obvious is one that too many citizens make: confusing acting with impersonating. When I heard today of the death of the great actor Philip Baker Hall at the age of 90, I thought of course of his magnificent work with the director Paul Thomas Anderson on three feature films — 1996’s Hard Eight, 1997’s Boogie Nights, and 1999’s Magnolia — but then I thought of 1984’s Secret Honor, a still-too-little seen Robert Altman picture in which Hall is the sole on-screen presence, playing a sometimes manic, sometimes conniving, sometimes shattered Richard M. Nixon. It is not accurate to call the film, based on a stage play, a monologue. Rather, it is Nixon’s conversation with himself, and with an absent god figure. And nowhere in the movie does Hall attempt to “do” Nixon. Yes, at the film’s opening his hair is slicked back in an approximation of the actual disgraced President’s style. But Hall doesn’t shake his jowls, flash V-signs, or feed any cheap signifiers to an audience that, at the time, would have had direct experience of Nixon. In an interview about the movie, Hall said the role was an ideal one for him because it was set in a familiar place: “The territory of older, troubled men.”

Hall began his career as a New York stage actor at the rather advanced age of thirty, prior to which time he had been an U.S. Army translator and a high school teacher. He made his film debut at age 40, in 1970. Secret Honor put him on the map with critics and cinephiles but got exactly the kind of mass audience traction you’d expect for a one-character picture in which a man unravels in an office. In Midnight Run he played Sidney, a Las Vegas=based fixer for the mob boss Serrano (Dennis Farina), who wants Charles Grodin’s character dead. His scrupulous expertise could have marked out a standard career path: supporting character actor in the kind of mid-scale ensemble picture that could make bank in the 1980s. 

Anderson flipped that script for Hall. First with a 1993 short film, Cigarettes & Coffee. In an interview, Hall recalled seeing its script for the first time: “I was wondering, who was the first actor in the seventeenth century to see a Shakespeare script, and did he know what he was reading? I certainly knew what I had in my hand.” 

There followed a feature, initially called Sydney. The film was retitled Hard Eight, but the logic of naming it after Hall’s character, a mysterious gambler who takes a fatherly interest in a young knucklehead played by John C. Reilly, is entirely evident. Sydney is an older, troubled man in almost every sense, but it’s not until the film winds to a close that our suspicions about him are confirmed. Sydney cloaks his defects, and the wreckage of his past, with an air of mastery. He’s the quiet man on the scene, the guy who knows how to get rid of the evidence with methodical effectiveness. And he’s ultimately the guy whose buttons you don’t want to push too hard. 

Initially Hard Eight didn’t get the distribution it deserved, but after Boogie Nights hit it became, and remains, something of a super-cult favorite, and quite deservedly so. Aside from Hall, it showcases Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Samuel L. Jackson, great performers who would subsequently take distinctly divergent career paths. They all are remarkably fresh and energetic here. 

In Boogie Nights Hall played an arguable villain, albeit in a low key: Floyd Gondolli, a guy who runs a bunch of porn theaters and wants the product to come cheaper; he’s the guy who inveigles Jack Horner to shoots on video and go gonzo. “This industry is gonna be turned upside down soon enough,” he insists to Horner. In powder-blue jacket and tie, he’s hard-nosed rather than unctuous, with an answer always at the ready. “Why help it,” Burt Reynold’s Horner replies. “Why not be prepared?” is Frank’s answer. His ruthless pragmatism enshrines the ancient adage that you can’t stop what’s coming.

In Magnolia the territory for his character, game show host Jimmy Gator, is harrowingly fraught. He is dying of cancer. He’s a philanderer. His daughter has accused him of molesting her when she was a child and he actually can’t remember whether he did or not. The role could be played as that of a monster, or of a fool; Hall does neither. In a movie full of almost apocalyptic exchanges between tormented characters, the one in which Jimmy tries to tell his very estranged, very angry daughter (Melora Walters) that he is dying is one of the most heart-rending. 

These movies did not make him a star, exactly, but they made him more of a known commodity, and in interviews and profiles he drew from a well of late-bloomer wisdom that never failed to illuminate and entertain. He did not get a whole lot of roles as seemingly demanding as the ones Anderson wrote for him, alas. But he worked steadily and was always a welcome presence. The Talented Mr. Ripley was the fourth and final film he made with Hoffman, for whom Hall had great admiration. He made government functionaries memorable in films such as The Sum of All Fears and Argo. He got in the bare-set trenches for Lars von Trier in Dogville. And it is of course great to watch him as the code-breaker in David Fincher’s Zodiac. He was also willing and able to use his stentorian voice and grounded bearing to hilarious effect, as he did playing a library policeman on Seinfeld and a small time politico on Cheers; more recently he did voice work on Bojack Horseman.

His final feature film was The Last Word, starring Shirley MacLaine as a controlling woman trying to ride herd on her own obituary. Hall played MacLaine’s estranged husband and in very gentlemanly fashion kept out of the way of MacLaine’s bravura turn. Sometimes the truly accomplished troubled older man knows when to yield the spotlight.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.