The Party's Over

Hoffman, 36, serves as protagonist and guide in The Party's Over, a documentary by Donovan Leitch and Rebecca Chaiklin set against the 2000 presidential election. It's a sequel of sorts to The Last Party, the same filmmakers' 1993 political documentary, which saw audience-surrogate Robert Downey Jr. cast a hypersardonic eye on the electoral process, gradually swapping disinterest for manic passion.

As Clinton's second term came to a close, Leitch and Chaiklin thought the time was right for a follow-up. Downey was chronically unavailable, and they wanted a different host anyway, so they approached Hoffman. He turned out to be a good choice?not in spite of his previously apathetic attitude toward politics, but because of it.

"I wasn't much of a voter in my 20s," says Hoffman, interviewed last week by New York Press. "I think I was probably like a lot of people of my generation. Through high school and college I didn't feel that a lot of that stuff really had much to do with me. You look at pictures of people voting, or you look at who's going into a voting booth, it's not a bunch of 18-year-old kids."

But Hoffman enjoys learning new things. So in the spirit of documentary filmmaking as the continuation of school by other means, he signed up to front The Party's Over.

In the movie, a camera crew follows Hoffman across America as he visits politicians in Washington and at campaign stops, attends the Democratic and Republican conventions, talks with many well-known political and quasi-political figures. He attends both the Democratic convention and an alternative political convention that's taking place simultaneously. He goes to Farm Aid. He checks in on a gun show in Maryland, hears former NRA president Charlton Heston hoist a rifle and declare, "From my cold, dead hands!" and listens as gun traders wax poetic on the Second Amendment. He talks to Jesse Jackson and Noam Chomsky. He watches Pat Robertson speak to the Republican convention.

In contrast to the Downey movie, which was a ruminative, entertainingly self-indulgent portrait of an actor turned loose on politics, Hoffman is more of a blend-into-the-woodwork sort. Sometimes he asks questions, other times he just listens and watches. His relaxed concentration has a tonic effect on the film; it encourages viewers to pay close attention to subjects they thought were familiar, on the off chance that they might hear something fresh.

"If you saw the first movie, you know [Leitch and Chaiklin] come at this material with a certain point-of-view and they want to get their point of view across," says Hoffman of The Last Party, an unabashed Go Liberals! movie. "I didn't want this movie to be my opinion about politics, and I didn't really want it to represent any one opinion. I wanted it to be representative of a lot of people's opinions. I really wanted to be more of an observer who's there to ask questions and respond to what's going on." The filmmakers, says Hoffman, "tried hard to make me more than that. I kind of fought it."

Although Hoffman could certainly be classified as a liberal, he doesn't tip his political hand during the documentary, even when firearm collectors are giving him the hard sell on the virtues of gun ownership. "Those guys were really interesting to me," Hoffman says. "They had real passion for what they believed."

Hoffman's performance (if one can describe an appearance in a documentary as a "performance") is more complex than the film itself, an MTV-style political-survey-with-attitude that often slants its observations by photographing liberals in a neutral way while reflexively making conservatives seem scary. During Robertson's speech, the camera alternates super-tight profile closeups of his eyes and mouth?visual shorthand for "crazy person" or "evil dictator."

Yet Hoffman never loses his bemused poker face. He nods and listens even when reputable politicians admit, with startling candor, that 80 percent of a politician's job consists of raising money and kissing ass, another 19 percent is eaten up by struggles against opponents, leaving about one percent for political victories, many of which are so compromised that they're tough to celebrate. As Tim Robbins complains to Hoffman early in the movie, quoting a Nader applause line, "the only difference" between Democrats and Republicans "is the velocity with which their knees hit the ground when corporate sponsors come knocking."

"I think if you really want to captivate people, tell them something they don't know," Hoffman says. "I really believe that's true. I think that's the way to interest people in things they're not already experts on. I also think the whole idea of someone having really definite opinions on anything is pretty suspect. I feel like there's no way one person can know enough about any subject, one subject, to be able to definitively say, 'I feel this way and nothing can change my mind.' I watch these guys on cable yelling over some issue and it seems false to me. It seems like an act. You never see a guy on one of those shows saying, 'You know, I never thought of it that way.'

"While we were shooting, there were a lot of times where I'd be interviewing somebody and realizing I'd kind of made up my mind about them already. At that point I'd have to stop myself and say, okay, would all this seem so ridiculous if I could walk in this guy's shoes? Everybody has reasons for believing what they believe. It's not always an ignorant, stupid reason. Sometimes it's a good reason. I felt the need to keep saying, 'I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.' I feel like if we ever think that we know, then that's the problem."

?Matt Zoller Seitz

The Party's Over opens Fri., Oct. 24, at City Cinemas Village East, 181 2nd Ave. (betw. 11th & 12th Sts.), 212-529-6998.