Feature

Family Affair

Living very separate lives on opposite coasts, the brothers had no intention of collaborating—or any reason to, really. Philip continued blowing away audiences and critics with cinematic supporting roles—becoming, for one thing, part of indie director Paul Thomas Anderson’s favored ensemble (following Boogie Nights with Magnolia and now Punch-Drunk Love)—and carving out a career onstage, both acting (he scored a Tony nomination for True West) and directing (at LAByrinth). Gordy, meanwhile, was writing plays—among them, Hong Kong and Frozen Cat—that would be mounted in New York, Chicago, San Diego, England, and Australia, starting his own troupe, the Company Theatre, in L.A., and becoming something of a big brother for the L.A. theater scene with his BlueCat Screenplay Competition (“The Annual Search for the Best Screenplay in the World”).

“When Gordy first wrote Love Liza, he didn’t write it with Phil in mind,” says the movie’s director, Todd Louiso, an old actor friend of Philip’s (Louiso was the dorky record-store clerk Dick in High Fidelity). “Of course, now it’s impossible to imagine anyone but Phil in the role.”

“In ’96, Phil and I just happened to both go home to Rochester for Labor Day weekend,” Gordy explains. “This is when it starts to feel like a conspiracy from heaven started to kick in, because I don’t think we’d ever both been home on Labor Day weekend before or since, other than when we were kids. I’d just finished Love Liza, and I gave it to him to read. I wasn’t even thinking about getting it made, it was just a matter of I’d finished something.”

“I read it,” Philip says, “and it was really strong, it was really good.” The brothers have a way of not being overly effusive in each other’s presence, but after a pause Philip adds, “It was really, really good. I thought, It should get done, and then it was like, I’ll do it. It wasn’t like he asked me or I asked him.”

Of course, heartbreaking films about gasoline-huffing widowers don’t get made easily, and the film’s backers—an ad hoc consortium of private investors and indie-movie mainstays (producer Chris Hanley, of The Virgin Suicides and American Psycho, among them)—came together in fits and starts only over a period of years. (It helped, too, that Oscar winner Kathy Bates committed to join the cast, as the mother-in-law of Philip’s character.)

It was shot in early 2001 in Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans on a budget so paltry that director Louiso was told that beyond the principal players, he’d have to cast locally to fill out the extensive supporting cast. “Todd said, ‘I can’t do it that way, I have to do this right,’ so he flew actors out from L.A. at his own expense,” says Gordy. “I mean, the guy must have written a five-figure check to the airlines.”

In the end, the brotherly connection between the film’s star and its screenwriter didn’t help much. “I sensed that Todd wanted to have autonomy,” says Gordy, “which any director wants to have, so I said, ‘Okay, I’m not going to go to the shoot, don’t worry, you take that script and you go make your movie’ ”—a decision he quickly regretted.

“I remember one night, one of the producers called me from Alabama. And I’ll never forget that, because at that point he was the only person who called me. It was such a disenfranchised feeling. It’s like the old joke that the writer on the set is like a hooker and after the hooker’s been paid, it’s like, ‘What are you doing here? Scram!’ ”

I interrupt Gordy to ask Philip, “When did you call?”

“I called him at the end,” he answers, a bit meekly, “and I called him once during the shoot just to say hi.”

“I wasn’t like, Why didn’t Phil call me?” says Gordy, “because I knew he was working—I knew it wasn’t going to be any different from any other movie when he’s unreachable because there’s a total commitment and immersion that has to happen. But I just had this feeling, this really alienated feeling.”

I then ask Philip, who’s looking increasingly pained, what he told Gordy at the end of the shoot. “Well, I remember thinking, You know what, I don’t know if this is going to be any good. There was just something about it where I was just so unsure. I felt like I could have done much better or whatever. It was my brother’s film—I wanted to be protective of what he had written. When it was finished, it was like, Now you can be a brother, and I called him and I left him a message basically like ‘I’m sorry. I hope I did okay.’

“It was kind of like we were back in high school again. I was going by Gordy’s bedroom and knocking on his door being like, ‘Oh, you know, I tried to do that thing that you did, and I hope I did it.’ It was very moving. Much more vulnerable than I ever like to get in my life.”

Philip looks directly at me. His eyes are moist.

“I get much more vulnerable in my work than I do in my life, I think. It was one of those moments where I was like, Wow, now I know why I don’t like to get this vulnerable, because on the phone, I couldn’t control how much I was feeling.”

With the Hoffman brothers, nothing is ever as it seems. Philip, the frat-guy look-alike, is the cinematic and theatrical shape-shifter who can portray absolutely any type of character. And “Gordy, who gives the impression of being this big, lovable bear,” says actor Dan Klass, “is really a poet.”

Klass, who’s known both Hoffmans since high school in Rochester, is yet another friend who got sucked into appearing in Love Liza—this extraordinarily moving film about death that is, of course, really about life.

“In a lot of ways,” Klass says, “Love Liza is a two-hour poem. People who see it will be shocked that it’s so unconventional, because it’s poetry -- it's not necessarily Screenplay Format No. 4. Gordy’s ability is to capture exactly what people say, but also what people don’t say and what they don’t reveal.”

I’d interviewed the Hoffman brothers when Philip was still undecided about whether to head to Broadway next summer to appear as Jamie in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (with Brian Dennehy, Vanessa Redgrave, and Robert Sean Leonard). When I call him to discuss his decision to do it, it becomes entirely clear that he shares with his brother an almost unnerving devotion to trying to express the inexpressible — no matter how painful.

“Acting onstage scares the hell out of me,” he says. “It scares the shit out of me. I’ve never done Long Day’s Journey. I’ve read it probably ten times, I’ve seen it four times. I just love the play, it’s one of my favorite pieces of theater, but I always think that with a play, you could pretty much just drop dead, you know?”

He lets out his familiar, resounding laugh.

“I mean, if I really thought about exactly what I was doing, which is basically exposing personal truths about myself to 600 strangers, I might just drop dead!”

Following up Love Liza by expiring onstage during Long Day’s Journey, I tell him, would be one helluva way to go.

“That’s right,” he says, laughing again. "Next August, I die!”