![]() ![]() you got all kindsa greatness,” he insists, force-feeding hope to his reluctant son. ![]() But those bright-eyed youngsters have turned into ordinary, confused adults, each in his own way an enemy of promise-a fact that alternately perplexes and enrages Willy, whose idealization of Biff puts a fire wall of fantasy between him and his furious disappointment. As a father, Willy basks in a nostalgic glow, remembering the boys’ idolatry of him. In his grandiosity, he inflates the facts and figures of his hapless life and he puffs the same optimistic smoke into his two adult sons, Biff (Andrew Garfield) and Happy (Finn Wittrock), who bear the scars of his delusional expectations. I’m not noticed.” Willy has begun to feel posthumous, or, as he puts it later, “I still feel kind of temporary about myself.”Ī blowhard of pluck and positivity (“Be liked and you will never want” is one of his mantras), Willy has always wanted to seize victory from the world and to claim the kingdom of self, to be a somebody-which is both the promise and the imperative of American individualism. “They seem to laugh at me,” he tells Linda about the buyers, adding, “I don’t know the reason for it, but they just pass me by. Willy has arrived at a kind of bewildering tipping point. “I have such thoughts, I have such strange thoughts,” he confides to Linda, his long-suffering wife (the tender and compelling Linda Emond). He is losing his concentration, his sales mojo, his salary, his temper, and, given his unmooring visions, maybe even his mind. “Oh boy, oh boy,” he says, thrumming the table with his stubby fingers, dimly aware that something in him is going terribly wrong. ![]() Inside, he slouches in a kitchen chair, like a tire deflating. He has returned home after falling asleep at the wheel of his car. In the first beat of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (now in a luminous revival, directed by Mike Nichols, at the Ethel Barrymore), the salesman Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) trudges up the path to his Brooklyn house, sample cases in hand. ![]()
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