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There’s something about suicide. Something about the quiet
desperation involved, about the path that is taken and the
hopelessness that is experienced to get to the point when
death seems like the only way to make things better. It’s
unnerving to think that it’s possible for people to feel that
bad off. And then, it’s there, it happens, and the ones left
behind wonder if they could have stopped it.
This guilt, this limbo of asking questions when you really
don’t want to know the answers, is the focus of Love Liza.
The story follows Wilson Joel (Hoffman), recently widowed
after his wife Liza’s out-of-the-blue suicide. Continuing
his daily routine after her death, Wilson goes through the
motions with a brave face while all the time self-pity and
indefinably intense grief bubble just below the surface. Liza’s
mother, Mary Ann Bankhead (Bates), wants Wilson to
let her share the grief, her own guilt and loneliness being
too much to bear alone. But Wilson pushes everyone away, preferring
a solitary depression that he can somehow control.
Unable to sleep in his bed because the empty pillow next
to his is just too much, Wilson begins to sleep on the floor,
and on this first night, he finds a letter from Liza to him
under her pillow. But he can’t bring himself to open it. Not
knowing what’s in it, in his mind, is much better than reading
it and possibly discovering that he was to blame for her suicide,
or worse yet, that his ignorance kept him from preventing
it. He begins to carry it around everywhere he goes, knowing
he should read it, but unable to tear into it. Mary Ann tries
to convince him to read it, because she’s in the same place:
She doesn’t know what the hell was happening with her daughter,
and it’s killing her.
As a way to cope with his grief, Wilson turns to huffing
gas fumes. It starts out with a tiny sniff from the open tank
of a car next to the curb. Before long, he’s progressed to
filling up a gas can and soaking rags with the liquid and
covering his face with them. One day, his boss, Maura (Koskoff)
drops by, and, as a cover story to explain the prevalent odor
of gasoline in his house, Wilson claims that he has developed
a hobby in remote-control model airplanes. Before Wilson knows
it, Maura has sent Denny (Kehler), a model airplane
enthusiast, to connect with Wilson. To keep up his ruse, Wilson
actually does develop the hobby, and finds it a welcome distraction
and an excuse to do something beside think about the implications
of that unopened letter. Between flying his planes and inhaling
his gas fumes, Wilson feels like he’s coping the only way
he’s been able to.
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Wilson is one of
those actorly studies in the psychological fallout that accompanies
severe tragedy. His devotion to the role is fearless, and
he makes himself look shitty beyond repair with absolutely
no self-consciousness. As his mother-in-law, Kathy Bates turns
in another one of those somehow mannered yet affecting performances
that have become her M.O. She does a great job at balancing
Mary Ann’s conflicting emotions, giving us insight into the
fact that she wants Wilson to deal, because if he can’t, then
she never will, but that she also needs her grief so that
she can feel the void Liza left, which is her only way to
preserve her. In Liza’s absence is the proof that she existed.
—Cole Sowell
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While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
