On a fated morning in November 1959, Truman Capote read quietly from his newspaper when a story caught his eye. Four members of a small farming family in Kansas had been brutally shotgunned to death in their home. Feeling inspiration grasp him, he phoned William Shawn, editor for The New Yorker, to see if he'd be interested in an article about the murders. As a result of that impulse, Capote wrote one of the most influential books of his generation. However, he also stated later that had he known what was to come from his stop in the unassuming town of Holcomb, Kansas, he would have gone right by "like a bat out of hell."
That book, of course, was the 1966 nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. Initially, Capote believed he would write about the effects of the murders on the rural community. "I don't care one way or the other if you catch who did this," he tells Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper), the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent assigned to the case. But then two drifters, Perry Smith and Richard "Dick" Hickock, are arrested and eventually charged with the murders. As Capote gets to know them, particularly Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.), he becomes obsessed with the pair and their story. He believes this is his shot at immortality. "Sometimes when I think of how good my book is going to be, I can't breathe," he tells his childhood friend, "bodyguard" and brilliant author in her own right, Harper Lee (Catherine Keener). He will stop at nothing to get his story. And while it did indeed make him rich and famous, the moral sacrifices Capote made left him emotionally shattered and ultimately lead to his untimely death.
Bennett Miller's 2005 drama, Capote, focuses on this short (less than six years) but critical time period in the writer's life. As Capote interviews various members of the community, from law enforcement to the killers to citizens of Holcomb and neighbors of the Clutter family, a narrative of incompatible fates begins to weave itself, taking on weight and depth as Capote begins to form relationships with these people. Beating at the heart of it all, however, is what becomes an impossible and disconsolate conflict - Capote gains the trust of these two men, becomes their friend, basically falls in love with Perry Smith, and yet in order for his book to have the ending he wants and believes it needs, Smith and Hickock must die. He tells them he will find them a better lawyer for their appeal, yet in a later phone conversation with Harper Lee he laments, "If they win this appeal, I may have a complete nervous breakdown." When Smith and Hickock finally lose their appeal and are hanged on April 14, 1965, Capote phones Lee again and says, "There was nothing I could have done to save them." "Maybe," she says, "but the fact is you didn't want to."
Truman Capote was a complex, interesting and deeply troubled man. How appropriate is it then that it would be another man who could easily be described with the same adjectives that would be fated to play the eccentric writer. The late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who passed away this year of a heroin overdose, doesn't simply imitate the Capote's unusual, high-pitched voice and odd mannerisms. No, in some ways he channels the spirit of the writer into his performance. As such, while his voice and mannerisms are incredibly well done in their own right, it's Hoffman's ability to convey how these things masked both a great intellect and seemingly cavernous and irreparable wounds that make his performance truly remarkable. Truman Capote was a man whose distinct voice and strange, effeminate mannerisms made him an outsider no matter where he went. As a child, born in Louisiana and raised in Alabama, he was mistreated and passed off from person to person. When he moved to New York he was gay and a Southerner, raised in the country far away from skyscrapers and socialites. And when he finally comes to Holcomb, he is the New Yorker, an odd city-slicker who "thinks he's better than us just because he dresses nicely and knows a bunch of celebrities." "Ever since I was a child," he explains while interviewing one of the Clutter's neighbors, "folks have thought they had me pegged because of the way I am, because of the way I talk." Likewise, Phillip Seymour Hoffman was an outsider in the acting world. An actor with leading man talent who was relegated to on-screen supporting roles for much of his career because he did not physically fit the mold of a megastar. And while both men eventually had tremendous success in their respective fields (including Hoffman winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for this performance), their eventual outcomes are unfortunately revealing of the sacrifices that they both made in order to achieve it.
Written by Dan Futterman and based on the biography of the same name by Gerald Clarke, Capote deftly and insightfully depicts the way in which as a writer works on a story, it works equally on him or her. As Capote speaks and dines with various members of the community, regaling them with stories of his run-ins with the likes of John Huston and Humphrey Bogart that may or may not be true, he studies them intently. He also convinces the local funeral director to let him view the heavily disfigured corpses of the the Clutters and is deeply disturbed when he peaks inside one of their coffins. Likewise, as he becomes more and more fascinated with Perry Smith, he draws connections to his own life. Perry is a skilled artist, doing many charcoal drawings while in prison. He was also passed around as a kid, and like Capote had both a distant mother and secret fantasies. "It's like Perry and I grew up in the same house," Capote tells Lee, "and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front." Not only do Capote's interactions with these people slowly reveal the story that will one day make him a household name, they also shine a light on some of his own demons. When Perry Smith tells Capote that he thought the father, Herb Clutter, was a nice, gentle man "right up until I slit his throat," it acts as a mirror for Capote's own arguably sociopathic behavior. And when Perry Smith's sister tells Truman, "Don't be taken in by my brother. he's got this sensitive side he'll show. You believe he's gentle and so easily hurt, but he'd just as soon kill you as shake your hand -- I believe that," we are forced to look at Capote, as he is forced to look at himself, and question whether or not the sister's thought might actually describe the writer and the things he has done to get his story.
One of my only real problems with the film, is the lack of depth of many of the other characters. Besides Capote, only Harper Lee and Perry Smith are given any complete semblance of three dimensionality. During the time Capote is researching and writing In Cold Blood, Harper Lee has time to publish her famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird, sell the rights to Hollywood and attend that premiere with Gregory Peck. Unlike Capote, Lee is a grounded and practical women who can easily see that Capote has feelings for Smith and yet will exploit him to get what he wants. "Do you hold him in esteem, Truman?" she asks. "Well," he replies, "he's a gold mine." Likewise, while Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) is only in the film for a few brief moments, Clifton Collins, Jr. as Perry Smith is depicted beautifully as an enigma. Is he truly this haunted, poetically minded man, full of pain and repressed emotions, who chews aspirin like peppermint candy or he is the psychopath that many people believe he is? Capote seems to believe he is a victim, a man who should not be forgiven, but pitied. But the question remains, does Capote believe this sincerely or does he believe it because it is how he wishes the world would see him?
We also get glimpses into Truman's relationship to his editor William Shawn played by Bob Balaban and his long-time lover, Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood). And while it would have been interesting to see how Shawn's pressure influenced Capote's resolve to push Smith harder and harder for details of that fateful night, as well as how Capote's relationship with Perry Smith and to his work put strain on his interactions with Dunphy, "Jack thinks I'm using Perry," Capote tells Lee, "He also thinks I fell in love with him in Kansas," these aspects of Truman's life are left mostly undeveloped in the film. However, I of course understand that in order to tell the story he wanted to tell, Bennett Miller had to sacrifice certain aspects of his subject's life. The film is called Capote. It's not called In Cold Blood or Truman Capote: A Life, it's called Capote. And so, focusing on the writer and how this brief time in his life changed him forever is both understandable and admirable and what I believe was a choice that ended up creating the best movie that could have been made.
Capote is an amazing and fascinating film about how one man, in order to achieve his greatest success, had to sacrifice his morals and self-respect. The 1967 film In Cold Blood by Robert Blake focuses more on the murders themselves without Truman Capote even making an appearance. And it is a good film. And if Bennett Miller would have simply turned the camera slightly and depicted the murders from Capote's point of view, this could have made for an entertaining movie as well. However, by instead turning an unflinching, uncompromising gaze upon the writer's moral decomposition, Miller exquisitely crafted one of the finest, most powerful films of the last decade. During one of their many interviews, Capote tells Perry Smith, "If I leave here without understanding you, the world will see you as a monster. I don't want that." And yet that is the exact impression people have been left with for decades since. Are we meant to view Truman Capote and his actions in the same light? Is he a monster? That's up to us to decide.
9 out of 10
