That Guy!: Philip Baker Hall

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

It's no secret that the selection of a That Guy! is a highly personal thing. I play favorites in this space, and make no apologies. There's nothing objective about why I'll pick a Tom Atkins but eschew a Burt Young — it's as simple as one appealing to me on a certain level and the other leaving me as cold as a glass of raw eggs. Everyone has their preferences when it comes to character actors, and finding agreement on the subject is harder than getting a group of a dozen movie critics to agree on a Coen Brothers film. Of course, every rule has its exceptions, and if there's ever been anyone with a bad word to say about Philip Baker Hall, I've never met them (and they better hope I don't, particularly in a dark alley, and with a couple of boxes of Sno-Caps in me). It's astonishing to consider that Hall is seventy-six years old — not because he doesn't look it, with his worn, lined face, perpetually plastered-down hair and eyes that droop with a combination of sadness and intelligence — but because he's looked that way for at least twenty years. The common perception that he sprung into the world fully formed, like Athena, from the imagination of Paul Thomas Anderson, ignores a film career that goes back almost five decades — not that it wasn't largely worth ignoring before he crossed paths with Robert Altman, who gave him a role that would forever grant him one of the all-time great film performances in history even if he'd never made another movie. But until Anderson made him the patriarch of his own personal stock company of actors, the bleary, wise Ohioan's bread and butter was in television. Putting in competent, bill-paying performances in everything from M*A*S*H and The Jeffersons to Family Ties to L.A. Law, he reached his greatest heights on the small screen as the absurdly overblown Lt. Bookman on Seinfeld, a library cop ripped from the pages of Mike Hammer and put to work in service of chasing down delinquent fines. It showed off Hall's considerable comic — indeed, self-parodic — skills, but he's still at his best as a tragic figure who has seen just a little too much of the world and is always waiting for a final moment of grace that may never come.

Where to see Philip Baker Hall at his best:

SECRET HONOR (1984)

One of the towering performances not just in his career but in all of American cinema, Hall's turn as a fictionalized Richard Milhaus Nixon is gripping enough to carry the entire film — and it does: he's the only person on screen during the entire hour-and-a-half runtime. Director Robert Altman, who knew Hall from television work, had seen him perform as Nixon in the stage version of Secret Honor, and trusted that he was enough of an actor to carry it over to film; the gamble paid off in spades, as the audience is held spellbound during the entire stunning performance.

HARD EIGHT (1996)

Sixty-five is the age at which you're supposed to retire, not the age at which you have your first real breakout performance. But Paul Thomas Anderson, who'd selected Hall based largely on the strength of his work in Secret Honor, chose him to play the tormented professional gambler Sydney in his full-length directorial debut. Watching the aging Hall play off of promising young character actor (and friend of this program) John C. Reilly is like watching an aging gunslinger trade shots with an up-and-comer, a dynamic which perfectly plays into their respective characters.

DOGVILLE (2003)

Philip Baker Hall's performance as Tom Edison Sr. in Lars Von Trier's controversial and daring story of degradation and evil served not only to record another terrific performance in his portfolio, but to put the critical establishment on notice that he wasn't a wholly owned subsidiary of Paul Thomas Anderson, Inc. Hall brings entirely new dimensions and depths to his performance as Dogville's patriarch, while never sacrificing his greatest asset: the ability to convey the weight of a man whose eyes have seen more than they should.

— Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab : burt young

That Guy!: Philip Baker Hall