Dustin Hoffman is “Rain Man”

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Oscar Winner “Rain Man” directed by Barry Levinson tells a story between Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) and his brother Charles (Tom Cruise). Mr. Hoffman has won an Oscar Award by acting as an autistic savant person. According to the story, this is extremely challenging cast to act since it is handicapped and has a complicated background.

Raymond was abandoned by his father since Charles was 3 years old due to his behavior and symptoms of his mental illness. He was taken care by a special care center and monitored by professionals, TV and books were his only media to connect with the reality. His passed father only visited him occasionally and Charles doesn’t even know about him until they met. Some necessary behaviors of the cast were fixed by the script such as symptoms of the illness and histories. Mr. Hoffman did an excellent performance with that. Raymond talks to himself and jailed is his own world; he talks with a stable quick speed of tone without any projection or reduction of voice. He doesn’t have any direct eye contact with people. Hoffman handled the cast well, to form basic character of the cast is to act stable, the difficulty is he need to act exactly the same every scene since Raymond has lived in formulated live in 30 years and according to his symptoms, he react abnormally to the reality. Therefore Hoffman can’t act with a common sense of life. This kind of acting is very advance and hard to handle.

The body languages of Raymond is also very special, he always walks with his arms straight while his hands are empty; it’s a very unnatural pose of a human being but Hoffman need to act it naturally. Hoffman also expressed Raymond’s insecurely behavior well with assistant tool of acting such as backpack and books. Audience could feel Raymond’s fear and unconfident when being outside of his grown up place as Charles took him away from there. Raymond sat like a hunchback with his hands always putting on his legs like a statue; I think Hoffman is trying to express Raymond’s power of concentration which is a god’s gift. He can calculate, memorize like a computer and helped Charles to overcome his Financial Crisis in prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /Las Vegas. His foot steps are also different form the care center to the metro areas, from steady to mess to express the fear of life change.

Hoffman also act well on his facial expression, in normal acting, rich of facial is always eye catching, but Raymond has a “Poker Face” which is even harder to act.  The art of acting in this part is acting the dull face in a colorful way. The mental explosion it also a very interest scene to the movie, when Charles was forcing Raymond to get on the flight, Raymond break down scream. The tips of this scenario is timing, cause bad timing would side walked from the reality, Hoffman always get the good timing there, which means audience can never expected.

In the story, Charles is leading Raymond back to LA, he is traveling with Raymond on a long trip, but in acting Hoffman is leading Tom. Hoffman was always the trigger of Tim’s frustration and emotion and finally leaded Tom back to cherish he his love ones form a self-centered person. I chose this as my topic because it shows the best performance of acting by Dustin Hoffman which is you don’t even know he is acting because he already became that person.