My cousin—a kind but sometimes splenetic man stricken with his irremediable vices and maladies—died at the age of 39 from a fentanyl overdose in his tiny room in my grandma’s attic a few years back. He was never a voracious reader or connoisseur of culture, and his film-watching habits were primarily based on what was streaming on Netflix. But one thing I always remember is the time, during a period when he was struggling to mitigate his ferocious longing for some kind of lab-made palliative, anything to give him relief from the demons conspiring deep in his soul, that he told me his favorite actor was Tom Sizemore. I’ve never known anyone whose favorite actor is Tom Sizemore—not because he wasn’t a good actor, but because he was rarely the lead. He was a man who spent his life burdened by addictions and emotional instability, who, after a decade of being one of Hollywood’s most consistently reliable character actors, spent his final 20 years gracing tabloid covers and taking gigs in bad movies to pay the bills.
Sizemore’s attempts to reject the beautiful beckoning of chemicals and the artificial paradise they promise, a herculean endeavor made even worse by the resilient stigma around addiction, and to find solace from the maelstrom ravaging his mind, were very public, and all but killed his career. Save for his unexpectedly emotional performance in Twin Peaks: The Return—in which he got to use his mercuriality and connate ability to intimidate and unnerve with a simple look, like the threatening blankness of his mind-your-own-business glare to a diner patron in Michael Mann’s Heat, while also getting the chance to be vulnerable in a way he never had before, an opportunity to play a desperate man who just may get the redemption that has long eluded him—Sizemore wasn’t given much to do from the mid-aughts on, suffering through over 50 disposable movies, most of which don’t even have Wikipedia pages, between 2018 and his death at age 61 last week.
You can see the shame in his face in these films, the look of a man with a lifetime of regrets. He’s not even bad in these movies; the problem is that very few of the roles offered him a challenge, or the possibility of pride from knowing that he can still deliver a genuine performance, can still leave an indelible image with just the stiletto stab of his unblinking eyes, can still bring humanity to characters that upset us, wayward men prone to bad behavior, without making us outright hate him.
Very few of the roles offered him a challenge, or the possibility of pride from knowing that he can still deliver a genuine performance, can still bring humanity to characters that upset us, wayward men prone to bad behavior, without making us outright hate him.
Tom Sizemore specialized in unsettled souls—cops and crooks, killers and creeps. He made you uncomfortable in a comforting way. Consider his best-known role, the thrill-seeking thief whose loyalty to his friends will be his demise in Heat, and compare his work here to, say, his turn as a sad, undeterrable detective who just lost his dog in a divorce in the otherwise not-very-good The Relic, a man whose life may be crumbling into a pile of dust and debris as he butts heads with the thick-skulled moneyed men and women at a museum event, refusing to give up his investigation into a series of gruesome, baffling murders.
He can play a treacherous knave, like in Strange Days, and a lunatic cop on an unwavering mission of bloodlust and mangled morality in Natural Born Killers, holding his own amid a uniformly stellar cast, all of them at their most disturbing, and as a troubled ex-cop whose crippling guilt drives him to drink opposite Bruce Willis in Striking Distance. He was a helpless romantic in Heart and Souls, and a soldier who’d follow Tom Hanks to hell if he had to in Saving Private Ryan; a fixer in Devil in a Blue Dress, and a malfeasant mob boss who always evades the law in Enemy of the State.
Many of Sizemore’s best performances are imbued with some sense of morality, or amorality, an array of men governed by their own unique set of rules, whether it’s the proper procedure for robbing an armored truck to get away clean or disobeying the mayor when he instructs Sizemore’s detective to back off of a case that could cause trouble for the perfidious public servant and his affluent supporters. Even in junk like Michael Bay’s bloated and oblivious Pearl Harbor he lends his scenes with a welcome sense of sincerity, providing a brief reprieve from Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett’s jejune and saccharine performances begging for respect. There’s just something about Sizemore, some kind of authenticity, that makes him compelling.
Many of Sizemore’s best performances are imbued with some sense of morality, or amorality, an array of men governed by their own unique set of rules.
For my money, Sizemore’s best performance is as a manic, irascible whacko of an EMT in Martin Scorsese’s elegiac Bringing Out the Dead. Nicolas Cage, never more restrained or vulnerable, haunts the film, lingering languorously and crestfallen, more of a vestige of a lost soul than a corporeal, flesh-and-blood man. John Goodman, as Cage’s first partner, plays his part with loquacious joviality, a gregarious counter to Cage’s spectral sorrow. Then Sizemore, one of Cage’s subsequent partners, shows up and immediately obliterates Goodman’s tireless geniality like a big battered wrecking ball. He’s stark-raving ridiculous, bellowing out delirious diatribes like a mad messiah, hellbent on beating up an annoying mental patient in the middle of the street in front of couness onlookers, totally unconcerned about repercussions, gleeful as he bludgeons a helpless guy who doesn’t even understand what’s going on.
Written by Paul Schrader, Scorsese’s film is concerned with guilt and redemption, with one woebegone man trying to find the will to live again as he cruises the darkened city streets, his face ashen and eyes exhausted, seeing the ghosts of the dead everywhere he goes. Cage’s last chance to save his soul becomes more tragic, admirable yet more futile, once Sizemore appears like an unadulterated force of careless chaos who’s trusted to save lives. We spend time with crestfallen Cage at a calm but not quite comfortable pace, and then Sizemore shows up and suddenly Cage’s melancholy seems so much more profound; we see what kind of madmen he works with, and his nocturnal tribulations, all those nights spent watching people die, take on the weight of tragedy. FL
