HOLLYWOOD — Failure, it turns out, is never far from Dustin Hoffman’s mind, and it doesn’t take much to get the 71-year-old actor reminiscing about the decade he spent in his 20s in New York when almost every audition ended in rejection, and he had to reconcile his ambition with his inability to land acting jobs.
“You’re saying to yourself that you think that you have talent and maybe people that you respect are echoing this, like your teacher,” he explains. “But you haven’t painted anything, so people can’t look at your painting. And you are living in a kind of private insane asylum, wondering, ‘Am I deluding myself?’ ”
The two-time Oscar winner’s point isn’t about self-delusion but about failure having its place in his personal mythology. For Hoffman, it’s the penumbra of desperation that makes victory sweeter. In fact, he credits luck as much as diligence for his success and still feels fortunate that director Mike Nichols was willing to cast the almost 30-year-old Hoffman in his career-making role in “The Graduate,” although the script called for a blond, blue-eyed WASP.
It’s a recent Saturday afternoon, and Hoffman is having lunch. He is almost immediately intimate, and he likes to talk and talk and talk — seemingly to everybody.
Failure, missed opportunities, longing and loss are on the discussion menu today because they’re the subtext of his new movie, “Last Chance Harvey,” a kind of final-shot-at-love movie featuring Hoffman and fellow Oscar winner Emma Thompson as two middle-aged people more comfortable with disappointment and failed expectations than the potential of happiness.
Watching them share the screen is similar to seeing two pros waltz effortlessly. Part of their onscreen ease, Hoffman says, comes from the fact that they are playing characters “close to ourselves.” They had become friends on the set of their 2006 film, “Stranger Than Fiction,” and wanted to re-create the rapport they developed on the set in a film where, as actors, they “could just go where the wind took us,” Hoffman said.
Hoffman plays a New York jingle writer with a failed marriage and an estranged daughter, trying desperately to cling to his job.
Talking to Hoffman becomes like listening to a fugue about desire that persists through adversity and about perfecting one’s craft. It’s a melody about hanging out with his buddies Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall in the ’50s, when they all were struggling unknowns.
Stories tumble out of Hoffman, as do digressions on film performances he has watched recently, like Ginger Rogers in the comedy “5th Ave. Girl.” But they’re not all random musings — Hoffman is trying to make a point through an accumulation of detail. Almost all the anecdotes involve moments when truth intersects with filmmaking, when reality informs the art.
Like the famous scene in 1969’s “Midnight Cowboy,” when Hoffman as the creepy, crippled con man Ratso Rizzo walks with his friend, the strapping Texas buck played by Jon Voight. The filmmakers had no permits to take over an entire New York City block, so director John Schlesinger had rigged up a hidden camera in a van. It was finally going well after about 15 takes when a cab almost hit them as they crossed the street. “It went through a red light,” Hoffman recalls. As Rizzo, he says, he screamed out with fearful fury: “I’m walking here!” “Now that is kind of a signature moment in that movie,” he says. “And when that happens, it’s the gift of movies.”
