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Capote   

Directed by: Bennett Miller
Written by: Dan Futterman
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr., Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood, Bob Balaban, Amy Ryan, Mark Pellegrino.
Country: USA. 

              


Four martinis

Reviewed by Hal Gray

Breakfast at the Clutters.

In 1959, the last year really when we stopped seeing the world in black and white, a family on the bald Kansas prairie were murdered in their beds. Similar grotesque acts had happened before and since, but the difference here was someone with a sharp eye and pen decided to write about it in book form and who had the temerity to examine the lives of the murderers in less than pejorative terms.
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The authour, Truman Capote, embedded in the effete New York literary scene, and gay and strange enough to frighten anyone in rural America, seemed doomed to fail in the project. He needed everyone—local citizens and police, prison officials and the accused—to cooperate. The fact that he gains their confidence and changes the course of literary history is the story Capote tells in as spare and stark a way as the book, In Cold Blood. It’s not a pretty picture.

Capote is an apt companion piece—‘The Making Of…’ a literary masterpiece, if you will. As Truman Capote’s life has been dissected with an essay in the New Yorker here, and a feature in Vanity Fair there, and dribs and drabs from numerous high-end gossip columns, the story of the writing of this seminal book has been told several times over. Capote distills it all into a clean, bitter and tragic retelling of how someone with ambition will shamelessly use others to achieve fame. It also leaves us asking, ‘what’s really the truth’ if truth be known.

One truth that can’t be denied is In Cold Blood changed the way we can write. Just look at the thousands of ‘creative non-fiction’ courses offered up in writing programs across the globe. Capote is perhaps ingenuous when the screenplay has Capote suggesting to legendary editor, William Shawn, that what he’s constructing will alter novel writing forever—although the conceit is wholly plausible.

Shot in a dark palette—so suitable to the black deeds of murderers with guns and pens—we’re kept at a short distance where Director Miller allows us to see what he wants us to see without flights of fancy. Not a linear frame is out of place. However, as the story winds down to the ending we know is coming, the story dies a little, loses energy, but thankfully doesn’t become turgid as most tragedies do.

Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a (in)credible and disciplined performance as Capote. I’ve never cared much for Hoffman’s acting. I find him large and awkward, amorphous in his interpretations, shifty perhaps as he calculates his next move, never seeming to make the move with conviction. None of this is evident in Capote. Maybe it’s strong direction, or camera work that makes him seem small and contained, or the fact that he at last has a singular leading role. Whatever, he deserves every good critique that comes his way. Underplayed and wholly believable, it’s a fine screen performance for any age.

Catherine Keener, as Harper Lee, confidante and babysitter for Capote on his trip to Kansas, is solid but underused. We perhaps expect her to say what we’d like to say to Capote when he’s playing with people’s lives, but we’re only left with guessing what she’s thinking. Clifton Collins Jr., as pseudolexicological killer Perry Smith, doesn’t have a lot of range. When the key scene with Capote arrives, he bends rather than breaks. Miller uses conventional flashbacks here to convey the horror of the murders. Chris Cooper just keeps getting better. As the lead investigator of the KBI (Kansas Bureau of Investigation) he fills the part to a tee. In fact, we don’t see enough of him.

Capote, of course, gets his story and the fame that comes with it. He has to bribe and lie and play shamelessly with peoples' emotions to pull it off. His meanness and lack of generosity are also well noted. The fact that he had to self-medicate with alcohol perhaps shows that his duplicity takes a personal toll.

‘In cold blood’ could very well be a description of how he produced the story about the Clutters and their killers.

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