Too much Hoffman

Bulky Philip Seymour Hoffman is usually welcome. In a cameo or supporting role, his menacing gravitas is a triple-chambered threat to male stars coasting along on attitudinising or a pretty face. But too much of Hoffman, and he becomes an exasperating deadweight.

There's much too much in a film, written by his brother Gordy, that cries "Art" at the top of its voice, without having much else to articulate.

It's a character study of grief. Hoffman plays Wilson, a ton-load of misery, whose wife has killed herself. Shocked and in denial, he returns to the beach resort where they met to ponder why, while pathologically remaining incapable of opening the letter she left to find a possible answer.

Director Todd Louiso honours Hoffman's watchability, but indulges the monotony of his self-pity to a damaging extreme. Kathy Bates is under-used as the mother-in-law who's got his number.

The film's main surprise is also one that thwarts sympathy: Wilson's growing addiction to sniffing gasoline (his wife gassed herself in the garage).

It begins with his covertly inhaling from car tanks and petrol pumps, then entices him into the anorak milieu of building model aircraft and racing them at "rodeos" on the Arkansas lakes. It's a novel but baleful twist on a familiar reason for mental and emotional crack-up, namely, crack itself.

But the danger of imitation that such scenes carry far outweighs the dramatic value of the illustration.

Does the distributor, Sony Pictures, consider it responsible to add a substance like gasoline to the list of kids' crazes that's even cheaper and more easily procured than harder drugs?

And what do the British Board of Film Classification's Quentin Thomas and Robin Duval consider justifies the permissive Certificate 15 they've awarded a film in which a couple of children barely older than 15 successfully importune Wilson for a jerry can of aircraft fuel to get high? It should at least be an 18.

Love Liza
Cert: cert15