It's a pity, but when Truman Capote is remembered at all these days, he is probably remembered as a crass caricature of celebrity in pursuit of itself. That was, after all, his most lasting incarnation — the guy who sashayed through our living rooms during the 1970s, a bloated, half-inebriated, self-absorbed snob perched on one talk-show couch after another, passing off catty remarks as if they were divinely received wisdom.
To anyone unaware of this creature's previous achievements, Capote was a joke. Long before it became commonplace, he was famous simply for being famous.
But he was once something more. A thoughtful surveyor of the American landscape with a dark wit and a gift for making the English language dance, Capote wrote beautiful books like Other Voices, Other Rooms and became a household name in the late '50s with Breakfast at Tiffany's. But the book that fully declared his genius (and, some maintain, destroyed him) was In Cold Blood, a self-described "non fiction novel" that anticipated our national obsession with reality TV, and reality-everything-else, decades before Americans fell in love with the stuff. Capote's true account of a brutal mass murder in the Midwest reported its facts with a journalist's precision and an artist's vision, and no one had seen anything quite like it before.
Capote is the story of how that book came to be written and what it did to the complicated little man who wrote it. Anyone who has read In Cold Blood or seen the 1967 movie version will be basically familiar with the raw material here — a pair of drifters reveal themselves to a reporter while awaiting execution for the senseless slaughter of a Kansas family — but Capote yanks the focus away from the killers and, as the title indicates, puts it squarely on the writer who attempts to tell their story. That writer is, of course, Capote himself, portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in an astonishing performance that elevates this movie from merely very good to unforgettable.
The film is not a biopic in the conventional sense; it's a richly nuanced character study, sometimes dreamy, sometimes disturbing, and with a rigorously constricted focus that concentrates on just a few significant years in the life of its central character. Capote begins with the horrific murders in Kansas in the fall of 1959, and culminates with the killers' executions and the publication of Capote's account some six years later. The events are not unrelated; the subjects of Capote's book must die in order for In Cold Blood to be born — every story needs an ending, after all — and Capote is ultimately all about Truman's inability to make his peace with that.
The film follows Capote as he learns of the murders, becomes increasingly intrigued by them, and eventually travels to Kansas to investigate. His companion for the trip is Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), a childhood friend whose not-yet-published To Kill a Mockingbird will soon earn her a Pulitzer Prize, and who serves as a sort of translator between the jarringly flamboyant Capote and the plain-spoken, unsophisticated townsfolk. Capote and Harper insinuate themselves into the little rural community, befriending a local sheriff through his book-loving wife, and eventually gaining access to the murderers.
As deep as Capote puts us under the skin of its title character, we don't really come to know Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the men who committed the murders. (For a closer encounter with the killers, the '67 film is still the way to go, especially for Robert Blake's still mesmerizing performance.) We watch as Capote cultivates relationships with the men, but the focus is all on the writer and on his conflicting motivations in getting to know them. For Capote and for Capote, the murderers are a means to an end.
Capote works on many levels, but it may be most invaluable for its insights into the creative process. At its core, the movie is a razor-sharp account of how artists frequently exploit their subjects and sacrifice what some might call their souls just to get their art made. In Capote's case, although he appears compassionate and genuinely affectionate toward the killers (particularly Smith, with whom Capote might even be a little in love), the relationship is ultimately a professional one. Capote works to get the men stays of execution when he still needs material and it's in his interest to keep them talking. When he gets what he needs from them, it becomes more convenient for them to simply die.
No one is more aware of the awfulness of this equation than Capote, although Hoffman paints him with such remarkable depth that he's able to come off as heartbreakingly soulful even while engaging in the most soulless hypocrisies. Hoffman gives us traces of all the Capotes that we think we know — the narcissistic dandy, the sensitive artist, the wit, the drunk, the twee fop with the whiny baby voice, the literary powerhouse — and fuses them all into a character too complex and human to be pigeonholed by any of those descriptions.
Director Bennett Miller, whose only previous big-screen experience is the 1998 documentary The Cruise, does a remarkable job here, painting vividly textured portraits of both the film's stark Kansas milieu and the super-sophisticated Manhattan social scene in which Capote reveled. At the center of it all is Hoffman's Capote, a fascinating and infuriating personality who lets art and life and truth and lies get the better of him. That's the real story of Capote, the tragedy of a man who causes pain and then sheds tears, leaving us to wonder if the tears are for his victims or for himself.
This article appears in Oct 26 – Nov 1, 2005.