Word: hoffmans
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...film's heart is the forced relationship between two dramatically different residents of the same New York apartment complex. Robert De Niro is Walt Koontz, a bigoted former cop, while Philip Seymour Hoffman is Rusty, a drag queen desperate for a sex change. When Walt suffers a stroke while trying to foil a robbery, he reluctantly turns to Rusty for singing lessons as therapy. Needless to say, the one-time enemies learn there's more to each other than meets...
...trilogy" about his hometown of Baltimore, Md. After Diner (1982), Tin Men (1987) and Avalon (1990), he felt he had finished with tales about growing up in the city's Jewish neighborhood in the 1950s. But then an ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY review of his 1998 movie, Sphere, referred to Dustin Hoffman as a "noodgey and menschlike" Jewish psychologist. The racial stereotyping annoyed Levinson ("Nobody would say Mel Gibson was playing a Catholic industrialist in Ransom"), but it also got him thinking about his youth again. Rather than fume, he sat down and wrote for three straight weeks, imagining characters from...
Next year Hoffman will portray his first romantic lead in David Mamet's State and Main, opposite Rebecca Pidgeon, but he scoffs at the notion of Hollywood stardom. He will, he says, continue living in New York City, doing theater (he'll make his Broadway debut in a revival of Sam Shepard's True West in February) and worrying about his love life. "I date," he says. "But it's a nightmare. You're traveling all the time. I gotta figure it out, because I want to get married and have kids someday." Listening, Amy? There's still time...
...plays Walt Koontz, an almost parodistically macho security guard, who is felled by a stroke as he tries to prevent a robbery in his New York City apartment building. As part of his therapy he requires singing lessons to help him remobilize his frozen vocal cords. Rusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman), his transvestite neighbor, is recruited to tutor him, while we settle down to await their inevitable bonding...
...cute vagaries of drag-queen life, on Koontz's messed-up romantic and buddy relationships. All this points to the preordained ending, in which everyone learns to get along with everyone else. De Niro's is a carefully studied performance, which pretty much concedes the screen to Hoffman's showy mix of transgression and tenderness. He's fine, but Flawless is a cause lost to feel-good cliches...