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Capote (Bennett Miller, 2005)

43 out of 100 what the numbers mean

There is a moment in Bennett Miller's debut feature, Capote - the telling of Truman Capote's research of the Clutter family murders and the subsequent publication of his greatest book, In Cold Blood - that defines - even places uder a microscope - the very essence of the film. This moment is the end of act one and the start of act two. This moment, although benign in the usual cinematic manner, gives birth, so to speak, to the rest of this guileful and wryly circumspect character study. The moment at discussion here, is when the killers - Richard Hickock and Perry Smith - are led up the courthouse steps in the middle of a winter's night. The entire town is there - as are Truman Capote and Harper Lee - to see the men that killed their neighbors and friends. The foreboding of a Shakespearean tragedy are lain bare right in front of us. These townsfolk watch these men being led into jail, as if the almost living are watching the nearly dead. The ghosts of the Clutter family slice a swathe of cold eeriness, like the scythe stroke of the reaper, over this scene and do so upon the remainder of the film. It is this wintery-breath motif that infiltrates all of the conversations between killer Smith - played with an icy sweet inner severity by Clifton Collins Jr. - and writer Capote - played with the heightened sense of a laid back urgency by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman - who many say should start practicing that Oscar acceptance speech - gives himself over entirely to the being of Truman Capote, in what at first may appear as mere caricature, but at once becomes more than the sum of its queer little parts. Capote himself - sometimes more famous for being a talking head on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in the seventies and early eighties, than for any of the books or stories he ever wrote - was a seeming caricature of himself - all self-mocking minstral show affectations intact. Hoffman captures this feel and takes its place as if a pod person from outer space - not that Capote himself may not have been from there as well. Hoffman's Capote - or the real Capote (they seem to overlap in this performance) - treads a fine line between cold calculating manipulation of Smith, for his own personal and social gains (ie. a best selling book) and some sort of unnameable superficial love for the young buck killer that he so inexplicably empathizes with. Hoffman not only becomes Capote for the film, he entraps Capote's quaintly egotistical frame inside his own and runs like hell with it. -December 19, 2005

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