Love Liza isn't a particularly memorable film, but there's one thing for which it's almost certain to be remembered. Movie buffs and cine-historians of the future are bound to observe that this was the film where Philip Seymour Hoffman made the leap from Great American Character Actor to Philip Seymour Hoffman, Name-Above-The-Title Guy. It's a pretty odd sort of leap, but it's a leap nonetheless.As leaps go, this one seems to take place painfully, in lugubrious slow motion and maybe even in reverse. Hoffman's the whole show here, but it's really more of an anti-show, like some mutated off-Broadway one-man production where the performer stands on stage the entire time, mumbling with a bag over his head.
Hoffman is on screen for almost every second of Love Liza, but, perversely, isn't allowed to really stretch or to show his chops. The actor's name is indeed the first thing we see, along with his bland, not-quite-handsome face (all those good bones struggling to bust through that baby fat), and the camera simply tags after him for the film's first 10 minutes, watching as he sulks and silently broods away. Get used to the brooding, folks, because that's about all there is, and there's a whole lot of it.
Despite what the movie's title might lead you to believe, the object of affection here is actually Hoffman himself, although it's affection of a mostly misdirected sort. Love Liza unfolds like a 93-minute love letter to Hoffman (or, more specifically, to Hoffman's ability to communicate pain), composed by the actor's brother Gordy — who, amazingly enough, actually won some sort of screenwriting award at Sundance for his work here. Come to think of it, the award's not that amazing after all, considering that Love Liza is a virtual catalogue of the stylistic ticks, skewed focus and aimless narratives often favored in Park City.
The movie begins by pounding us soundly over the head with the inescapable fact that Wilson Joel (Hoffman's character) is a man alone and in distress. He shuffles about the house, stares into space, does more of that sublime sulking (there's barely a single line of dialogue in those first 10 minutes of screen time, unless you're counting grunts, snuffles and sighs). He sleeps fitfully in a little corner of the floor, even though there's a perfectly good bed right there in the next room. One clumsy bit of exposition later, and we discover the source of the distress: Wilson's wife has just killed herself.
At root, Love Liza is about one man's reaction to a personal tragedy, and the movie initially gives the impression that it's going to take us on a journey structured according to the classic stages of grief. The movie's problems are numerous, but they begin with the fact that it never really gets beyond the first or second stage. There's a whole lot of avoidance and denial going on here, but not much else.
Wilson wanders through the film uncomfortable in his own skin, unable to sleep in the bed he shared with his wife, barely able to even stay in his own house. The movie makes a particularly big deal of an unopened suicide note from his wife (the titular Liza) that Wilson carries around in his pocket, turning it into some sort of ham-fisted symbol of emotional paralysis. "I think I did something," is all he can manage to stutter in response to his neurotic fear of reading the note and discovering some awful, undesired truth.
Almost inevitably, Wilson develops a substance-abuse problem, but since this is a Sundance award-winning independent film, and therefore by definition "quirky," our hero's abused substance of choice is also a quirky one. In a bit of narrative coloration recalling the glory days of Bela Lugosi's supremely odd, off-screen ether addiction, Wilson develops a jones for sniffing gasoline.
If all this sounds like turgid, albeit eccentric drama, it is and it isn't. There's a disconcerting mix of moods throughout Love Liza, and it's often not all that clear what mood the film's trying to express. Gordy Hoffman's script and Todd Louiso's essentially glum direction frequently seem to be attempting to conjure up a spirit of black comedy, but the spirit is weak and generally unwilling. Moments like the one depicting a distraught Wilson's wildly inappropriate laughter in a very public workplace are probably supposed to be funny as well as poignant but wind up as neither. Louiso's direction is unsure and flat-footed, the response of the actors surrounding Hoffman is transparently stagy, and the whole scene simply feels wrong.
For that matter, what are we to make of the movie's penchant for little sight gags that also conveniently serve as bargain basement metaphors for everything falling apart. Things keep tipping over and malfunctioning in Love Liza, from tropical drinks precariously perched in the sand, to baskets of flowers left at a graveside, to a glove compartment that just won't close. Each object gets a perfunctory close-up as it topples over or otherwise screws up, just to ensure that the enormous hilarity and profundity of it all won't escape our attention.
The film starts feeling a bit more cohesive — and more fun — during its midsection, when Wilson's addiction to gas fumes morphs into what appears to be a genuine affection for model airplanes (it's a curious path that shouldn't be spoiled by describing here). The film's short-lived high, so to speak, all too quickly dissolves into a disastrous third act that's one of the more numbing accounts of a slide into the abyss since Leaving Las Vegas. Nothing really prepares us for it, as the movie's periodic attempts at humor stop altogether, and Love Liza hits rock bottom.
One could be generous, I suppose, and assume that Love Liza is deliberately dull and affectless as a way of expressing its central character's fume-induced fuzzy-headedness and overall, arrested development. One could assume that, but one would be wrong.
It's possible to make interesting, dynamic movies about lives that go nowhere, but the non-journey presented in Love Liza is as soggy and unsatisfying as any you'll see, and the movie simply follows suit. The film feels hermetically sealed, a chamber piece that befuddles more than it intrigues, with virtually no narrative arc, no character development and very little depth (other than the sheer emotional weight conveyed by Hoffman's presence — which is alone probably reason enough to endure the film). We even get regular infusions of astonishingly lame alterna-pop tunes that spell out our hero's unspoken feelings so plainly as to border on unintentional parody. Sample lyrics: "His wound is bleeding night and day," "Do you pride yourself in being alive?" and the always reliable "I think I'll just disappear."
It's a credit to Hoffman's skill as an actor that he manages to make this mostly tedious disappearing act remotely interesting. Oddly enough, Love Liza plays out in may ways like a significantly diminished bookend to the recent film About Schmidt, with Liza featuring a self-destructing seeker at the early-middle part of his life rather than the middle-end. Both movies deal with a character whose loss of a spouse exposes a void in his life, prompting a half-serious/half-zany voyage of discovery in which nothing much is delivered. Both movies have their funny/poignant hook: Schmidt had his Tanzanian foster child pen pal, Wilson his ever-present canister of gas. Both movies hark back to angsty-existential 1970s road movies like Five Easy Pieces, with each featuring at least one big blowout modeled after Nicholson's famous argument with a diner waitress over a chicken salad sandwich. (Hoffman's confrontation with an unhelpful pancake house manager is almost an exact clone.)
Nicholson starred in both Five Easy Pieces and About Schmidt. Kathy Bates appeared in About Schmidt and also in Love Liza. Philip Seymour Hoffman has already made quite a few great movies and, hopefully, will make many more.
Love Liza is not one of them.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2003.