director
Bennett Miller
screenwriter
Dan Futterman
based on
the book by
Gerald
Clarke
producers
Caroline Baron
Michael Ohoven
William Vince
cinematographer
Adam Kimmel
music
Mychael Danna
editor
Christopher Tellefsen
cast
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Truman Capote)
Catherine Keener (Harper Lee)
Clifton Collins Jr. (Perry Smith)
Chris Cooper (Alvin Dewey)
Bruce Greenwood (Jack Dunphy)
Bob Balaban (William Shawn)
Amy Ryan (Marie Dewey)
Mark Pellegrino (Richard Hickock)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 98m
u.s.
release: 9/30/05
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
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Try as it might to wrestle
with the ethics of writing, Capote is a very minor film
with a major performance. That performance is by Clifton Collins
Jr. as Perry Smith, the killer made famous in Truman Capote's
"nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood (and played
in the 1967 film version by Robert Blake). Collins, who impressed
me as the coke-snorting campus drug dealer in The
Rules of Attraction, gives us a murderer with
the soul of an artist, a man intelligent enough to wonder how
he and his partner Dick Hickock came to kill an entire family.
You understand why Capote finds Perry interesting enough to keep
visiting and writing about.
And Philip Seymour Hoffman
(who has already picked up a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for
his performance, and is considered a favorite for the Best Actor
Oscar)? He's good, too, but the movie seldom gives him a chance
to rise above caricature. His Truman Capote is the Capote we're
familiar with from countless talk-show appearances: fey, witty,
self-aware of his self-absorption. What happens when a cosmopolitan
sprite like Capote collides with the rough masculine world of
law enforcement? Capote manages to charm everyone he meets in
sleepy, wheat-covered Kansas, giving no one a chance to reject
him as a snob or a homosexual. We understand intellectually that
beneath that charm is a remorseless ambition -- to write the
great American book about the Kansas murders -- driven, in turn,
by his rootless upbringing and need for approval. Unfortunately,
the motives of an affluent writer are considerably less compelling,
and useful, than those of a killer.
Hoffman tries, but mainly just
gets the surface of Capote. There's more going on with Capote's
lifelong friend Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird,
played by Catherine Keener with a nicely restrained sharpness.
I could've done with more scenes of Capote and Lee, and a bit
less of Capote whining on the phone about the book he's writing,
or not writing. He zeroes in on Perry, the sensitive killer --
a fabulous subject! -- and seduces him into his confidence. I
applaud the film for keeping Capote's feelings about Perry ambiguous;
we're never sure if he really likes Perry or is just cozying
up to him for the book. But the movie assumes our interest in
Capote's conflict with himself is stronger than our interest
in, say, the relatives of the victims, or even the other killer
Dick Hickock, who's barely sketched in.
Non-directed by Bennett Miller,
who previously made the 1998 documentary The Cruise,
the film runs only 98 minutes but drags terribly, its camera
wading through drab color schemes that the peacock Capote himself
would've found intolerable. Whether the fault of the sound mix
or the theater's sound system, much of the dialogue is incomprehensible,
particularly Capote's. The film has ridden to its nominations
for Best Picture and Best Director on the strong back of Philip
Seymour Hoffman, who has given better performances in better
movies; this is simply his year, his time to be recognized by
his admiring peers. Capote is more fun to talk about than
to watch; its chosen subject and theme deserved a writer and
director who could make its interiorized conflicts crackle, and
Bennett Miller just points and shoots like a TV hack. I was ready
for a solid drama about a writer entering the heart of darkness
and, through equal amounts of manipulation and compassion, emerging
with great literature. Capote is that drama, sort of,
but it's oddly remote and full of editing choices (sometimes
the movie plays as though they used the first take of whatever
they had and banged it together as best they could in the editing
bay) that distance it even further. Is this the best that American
independent film can muster nowadays?
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