Leave that film and go immediately to "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," directed by Sydney Lumet, and you might start to think Buffalo is fun city. Hoffman and his brother, played by Ethan Hawke, try to rob their parents' jewelry store in Westchester and it goes terribly wrong. They spend the entire movie trying to extricate themselves from one mess after another, succeeding only in miring themselves deeper and deeper in a muck of their own making.

Hoffman's character is married to Marisa Tomei, which ought to cheer him up; it would certainly cheer me up. She happens to be spending every Thursday in bed with his brother, but Hoffman doesn't notice because he has a very expensive heroin habit, the kind where you go to a nice apartment and a beautiful androgynous person shoots you up while you look at the view and listen to music. It's not the sordid kind of habit where you shoot up in the bathroom in the subway.

Ethan Hawke is a weak, pathetic character, easily manipulated by his brother, and his brother is so desperately self destructive that, from the beginning, there should be no hope for either of them.

This is not the kind of movie where you go out humming the tunes or hoping to run into one of the characters at the bar down the street. There are no car chases, no special effects; and the heist, which happens in the first 10 minutes, is a miserable failure. But the movie is brilliantly done. Hoffman, once again, completely inhabits the character he plays; or rather he allows the character to take him over so completely that there is no difference between the two. And except for the fact that both characters are depressed, albeit in very different ways, and they are both overweight, they bear very little resemblance to each other. But they do bear a phenomenal resemblance to real people. And that is his art.

Now, if you were to go on and finish the year of Philip Seymour Hoffman you would have to watch "Charlie Wilson's War." I don't recommend watching it except to finish the PSH trilogy.

With Mike Nichols directing, Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts starring and Hoffman in a supporting role, it should be a very good movie. But Hanks does all his work inside the frame. Never for a moment do you think that this character actually might exist, or have a life that you are not witnessing. And it is based on a real US Congressman, who really did the things he does in the movie.

Julia Roberts somehow got a reputation for being beautiful and irresistible and smart, so she is cast as a Texas woman of great importance, power and wealth. But I don't buy it for a moment. Nichols directs from such a distance, in such a dispassionate way, and Hanks and Roberts have made no more commitment than the most ordinary of movie stars.

But the movie is about people who, if anything, are passionate so it is doomed from the casting. Dinner conversation and the stories around the set were probably pretty good, but the movie isn't.

Except for Hoffman.

He plays a CIA agent. He is overweight, work obsessed, doomed to failure, extremely smart, a true lover of freedom and servant of his country. There is so much going on in every moment he is on screen, he is so deeply and thoroughly committed to understanding his character, that you long for him to come back into the story, you wish it was his story and you could follow him around. It should have been his movie. It's his war.

After watching these three, all of which came out last year, the only thing I question about Philip Seymour Hoffman is whether he can do comedy. Acting is about focus, concentration, commitment, intelligence, passion, and research. He makes me very proud to be in that tribe. But that level of work can leave you alone. The characters he plays are very isolated from the people around them, even the ones who love them and whom they love.

In "The Savages," he finds his way towards happiness at the end. He sees the possibility. In "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," the only hope for him is silence and death. And in "Charlie Wilson's War," his character must find another war to analyze and to fight. It is a lonely, frustrating existence and he'll never get any respect for it. And he'll never be Jason Bourne. Never get the girl. But those are the choices that he makes.

Friends tell me that Philip Seymour Hoffman is not a good interview. I think he must live such a rich interior life, and such a sober, questioning one, that I am not surprised that he is somewhat ineffectual in clever conversation. He lives within his work. Let it speak for him.