Risky Business
Violence, art, and trust collide in gripping 'Capote'

Whatever you might think you think about the real-life Truman Capote, chances are you'll find something mesmerizing in Capote. The debut feature from director Bennett Miller and actor-turned-scriptwriter Dan Futterman, the film zeroes in on a four-year period in the life of the renowned writer, celebrity, and social gadfly when he altered the course of his career, and his life, in writing the watershed "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood.

Capote was best known up to then as the author of Breakfast At Tiffany's, and profiles in The New Yorker. But In Cold Blood changed everything, with its intense narrative portrait of a horrifying true crime committed in a remote Kansas farmhouse. Not only was it a completely unexpected book from short, pale, bespectacled, flagrantly gay socialite Capote, it was a completely original kind of book that launched the genre now known as the true-crime novel. But writing it took its toll—particularly in the course of Capote's involvement with the killers convicted of the crime—and the film is at its uncompromising best in dissecting what an artist must be willing to risk and discover in himself to produce such a landmark work.

Adapted from Gerald Clarke's biography, the film begins in November, 1959, with the discovery of a brutal crime scene in Kansas: a family of four shot to death in their home. Cut to Manhattan (the first of many dissolves contrasting the vast, empty skies of the rural Midwest with the glittering skyscraper palaces of New York City), where enfant terrible Capote (an uncanny Philip Seymour Hoffman) is holding court at a cocktail party, regaling guests with stories in his airy voice, and downing martinis with an elegantly extended pinkie.

Searching for a subject for his next article, Capote reads about the Clutter family murders, and takes a train to Kansas with his longtime friend, Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), on the cusp of publishing her own landmark novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. Befriended by the wife of investigating agent Alvin Dewey (the ever-reliable Chris Cooper), the New Yorkers not only gain access to photos and files, they're on hand when two suspects are captured in the case: drifters Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.)

The small-town facilities are so inadequate, Smith is held in "the women's cell"—a cage in the kitchen of the local sheriff. Capote visits him there, struck by half-Cherokee Smith's dark, brooding looks and quiet-spoken demeanor. After the killers are convicted and sentenced to die, Capote continues to visit Smith on death row. As they bond as a fellow outsiders, abandoned children, and underdogs, Smith entrusts the writer with his personal journals. And Capote begins to envision his project as a sweeping book about the two Americas—safety and comfort vs. poverty and violence— colliding in that Kansas farmhouse. "When I think how good it could be," he whispers to Lee, "I can hardly breathe."

The shifting currents of Capote's relationship with Smith—and with himself—are the core of Miller's film. As moved as he is by Smith, Capote abuses the trust he so tenderly earns, jetting off to Spain for a year to write, and allowing Smith to believe he's writing some sort of tract to save them. He helps them get their first stay of execution to appeal, but as the years drag on and Capote longs for "an ending" so he can finish his book, he's not so responsive to Smith's pleas for help. Capote's personal relations with Lee, and his longtime partner, Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood), are strained over the project; not only the crime, but Capote's pursuit of the story are committed in cold blood.

Hoffman walks the fine line between parody and empathy, humanizing Capote with moments of vividly clear-eyed self-possession, deeply-felt conflict, and steely ambition beneath the familiar mannered persona. Collins turns in a star-making performance as Smith, sinister, vulnerable and tragic. He gives the movie its most devastating moment, confessing how the murders happened, and why. Miller keeps a foot in both worlds, from grisly crime scene photos to opulent gatherings of the New York glitterati, suggesting just how wide the gap is between the two Americas that Capote tried to bridge, and what he lost of himself in the process.

CAPOTE With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, and Clifton Collins Jr. Written by Dan Futterman. From the book by Gerald Clarke. Directed by Bennett Miller. A Sony Classics release. Rated R. 98 minutes. (***1/2)
Review published in Good Times, Oct. 27, 2005