Remembering Bob Hoskins
By Edwin Davies
April 30, 2014
Yet the quality of his performance shouldn't have surprised me that much, since one of the things that marked Hoskins as great was the way in which he brought something to every role he played, even when the roles themselves might not have been substantive. Even in something as terrible as Steven Spielberg's Hook, in which he played Smee, he seemed to be having a great deal of fun, to the extent that he's pretty much the only part of the film (other than Glenn Close(?) being fed to scorpions) that I remember. As recently as Snow White and The Huntsman, which was his last performance, he brought a great deal of pathos to a character (a blind dwarf who acts as the moral compass for the band of misfits who end up helping Snow White) that could have been instantly forgettable.
But even if Hoskins brightened up any film he happened to appear in, no matter how minor the role (another good example: his brief appearance as J. Edgar Hoover in Oliver Stone's Nixon is a thousand times more interesting than the entirety of J. Edgar), the performances that stick in my mind are his relatively infrequent lead roles (including his turn in Super Mario Bros., though that sticks out for other reasons). Given the chance to anchor a film, Hoskins often excelled at playing tough thugs and gangsters and, particularly as he got older, more melancholy paternal figures.
British director Shane Meadows (This Is England) made particularly great use of Hoskins in his second feature, 1997's Twenty Four Seven. In it, Hoskins played a man who tries to help some of the local youths in his community by getting them to channel their frustrations into an amateur boxing club. Since the film begins with a clearly ill and destitute Hoskins being discovered living rough, and the rest of the story is relayed in flashback, it isn't a spoiler to say that things don't turn out well.
Twenty Four Seven could have been an unremarkable film considering that "man tries to help his community by opening (insert sport club here)" is a pretty tired formula. Yet it is elevated almost solely on the strength of Hoskins' performance and the way in which his wide-eyed optimism in the flashbacks contrasts with the heartbreaking end result. It's an utterly captivating performance that deserves to be talked about more as one of his best.
Yet far and away his best performance can be found in the 1980 gangster film The Long Good Friday, in which he plays a British gangster hoping to clinch a deal with the Mafia, one which gets gradually derailed by the interference of the IRA. Hoskins is great throughout as a man desperately trying to maintain his composure as things start to unravel, but the crowning achievement of the film is its final scene, in which (spoilers!) after telling his American counterparts what he thinks of them in no uncertain terms after they pull out of the deal, he walks to his car and is confronted by a couple of IRA members (one played by a very young Pierce Brosnan) who then take him away at gunpoint to an unspecified (but easily imagined) fate.
The long unbroken shot of just Hoskins' face in the cab is one of my favourite moments in cinema. As he cycles from confusion to anger to scheming to a begrudging acceptance, it says everything without saying a single word. Director John Mackenzie asked Hoskins to imagine the entire plot of the film up that point and react to each event in kind, which is kind of wonderful. For me, that sums up everything that was great about Hoskins as an actor: his ability to be completely devastating with just an expression (a skill he also employed in the Pennies From Heaven-esque video for "Sheila" by Jamie T, which is filled with terrifically expressive moments and ends on a quietly heartrending look from Hoskins). It's also the thing that I will miss most knowing that we have seen the last of his work. Still, I’m glad for the years of great performances we still have.
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