Dustin Hoffman, awash in reflection

Failure, it turns out, is never far from Dustin Hoffman's mind, and it doesn't take much to get the 71-year-old actor reminiscing about the decade he spent in his 20s in New York when almost every audition ended in rejection and he had to reconcile his ambition with his inability to land acting jobs.
"You're saying to yourself that you think that you have talent and maybe people that you respect are echoing this, like your teacher," he explains. "But you haven't painted anything, so people can't look at your painting. And you are living in a kind of private insane asylum, wondering, 'Am I deluding myself?"
The two-time Oscar winner's point isn't about self-delusion but about failure having its place in his personal mythology. For Hoffman, it's the penumbra of desperation that makes victory sweeter. In fact, he credits luck as much as diligence for his success and still feels fortunate that director Mike Nichols was willing to cast the almost 30-year-old Hoffman in his career-making role in "The Graduate," although the script called for a blond, blue-eyed WASP. ("I always thought there was a kind of cloaked racism in what we call leading men," says Hoffman, speaking about the casting practices of a studio system that was crumbling as he was coming of age as an actor.)

It's a recent Saturday afternoon, and Hoffman is having a burger at the Casa del Mar hotel overlooking the ocean in Santa Monica, or rather he's insisted on sharing a burger and eating French fries off this reporter's plate. Dressed in jeans and a shirt, he maintains the air of a prosperous paterfamilias rather than the wiry kinetics of his youth. He is almost immediately intimate, and he likes to talk and talk and talk -- seemingly to everybody who crosses his purview.

Failure, missed opportunities, longing and loss are on the discussion menu today because they're the subtext of his new movie opening on Christmas, "Last Chance Harvey," a kind of final-shot-at-love movie featuring Hoffman and fellow Oscar winner Emma Thompson as two middle-aged people more comfortable with disappointment and failed expectations than the potential of happiness. Watching them share the screen is similar to seeing two pros waltz effortlessly. Part of their on-screen ease, says Hoffman, comes from the fact that they are playing characters "close to ourselves." The duo had become friends on the set of their 2006 film, "Stranger Than Fiction," and wanted to re-create the rapport they developed on the set -- the "us just hanging out," as Hoffman describes it -- in a film where, as actors, they "could just go where the wind took us."