Dustin Hoffman has made a career playing characters with little Character - vague, watery men, incapable at times of even speaking, much less acting. Sometimes this works to his advantage, as in The Graduate, where the comedy is his haplessness, or Straw Dogs, in which he is forced to confront this weakness at an existential level. But other times, in place of Character, Hoffman lets loose with a barrage of tics and, taken to the extreme, he wins an Oscar for Rain Man.
Our director here, John Schlesinger, made some truly great stuff in his time, including Billy Liar, Darling and the very strange The Day of the Locust. But he also directed Midnight Cowboy, where he made the mistake of letting Hoffman run riot over the film (and his co-star Jon Voigt) with his tic-infested turn as Ratso Rizzo. People have always had good things to say about Marathon Man, however, and often mention it in the same breath as The Parallax View and 3 Days of the Condor, two very good political thrillers from the 1970s. And with the promise of a great torture scene from a friend who knows his torture, I took it home the other night.
For a good portion of its running time, Marathon Man moves on two parallel tracks. On one, Hoffman is Babe Levy, a quietly intense marathoner and Columbia post-grad with a dissertation to write. On the other, his brother, Doc (Roy Scheider), is a covert operative for the US government, moving a mysterious package for the morally suspect Klaus Szell (who dies a terrific death in the first scene of the film). The movie begins to cohere when Christian Szell (Laurence Oliver), a one-time Nazi dentist (with all that implies) and the brother of the dead man, comes to New York to secure the safety deposit box where the package originated, with Scheider and, eventually, Hoffman the only people standing in his way.
Marathon Man is a good enough thriller, well-structured, rife with twists and, like so many films from the Seventies, unafraid to take its time – but it’s nothing more than a thriller; it has moments of greatness (including that torture scene which I won’t spoil) but it’s not great. This may be a result of William Goldman’s screenplay. Thinking about it afterwards I wondered, for example, why Hoffman’s father had to be a victim of the McCarthy hearings, why Hoffman had to be writing a dissertation on tyranny, why Scheider had to be an agent for the most secret of government organizations, why Olivier had to be a Nazi – as if by merely pointing at political things, the film could be made political; as if the film - lacking consequence – had to be packed with the stuff to become Important.
