Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Philip Seymour Hoffman
*and the ever charming...*
Catherine Keener
Directed By:
Bennett Miller
Nostradamus, Wall-Street, the NASA scientists and all the prediction authorities of the universe saw this coming. After being completely enthralled by a reading of In Cold Blood, I HAD to watch Bennett Miller's Capote, which chronicles the writer's life during the writing of his magnum opus. Movies ABOUT writers are rare, so imagine movies about good ones. It's always interesting to see what kind of person is behind such a titan of a book.
Truman Capote (Hoffman) was this city-dwelling, party-going, snobbish writer and New Yorker employee when he read a tragic story in the paper. A whole family being shot point blank in the face by unknown trespassers. Intrigued and moved, he asks his editor for travel fund to go work a paper on the crime and its effect on the city, along with his lifelong friend, author Nelle Harper Lee (who is portrayed by the ever great and lovely Catherine Keener). Soon enough, Capote realizes the scope of the drama he's dealing with and his writer-sense tingles up to boiling point. At one time he says: "When I think about how good my book will be, I can't breathe"
The film more or less hovers over the book, in order to concentrate on its writer. It's an honest, borderline courageous decision by Bennett Miller to overlook the spectacular event in order to concentrate on a more intimate narrative about a very cerebral man. The movie centers itself around the latest part of the book called "The Corner" where the killers await their execution. More accurately, it's focusing around the relationship Capote establishes with Perry Smith, one of the two man, who is tagged in the trial as "having potential mental issues". Miller portrays their relationship as abusive and based on deception, mostly from Capote. About how he tried to friend Smith in order to get the story from him, to give In Cold Blood the amazing ending we know it.
Watching Capote, I couldn't avoid thinking about this whole cinema challenge: It's not an image, but an image of an image I'm seeing, so how much of this is true? When the movie was filmed, Truman Capote has been dead for more than twenty years. Aside from the eerily accurate physical expressions of Philip Seymour Hoffman, most of the movie is based on second hand accounts of the character, especially what happened in this cell, during the long hours where Truman Capote and Perry Smith talked together. No one really know what they told each other. They were accounts made from Capote, than from his friends up to the director's ears.
It's a very human story of redemption at the end of the world. Capote comes to Smith and Hickock at the gallows to ask for their forgiveness, which they grant him. It's his fault if they lived for so long because he found them lawyers who would work pro-bono. How did Truman Capote left himself out of the tale like this, I do not know. He was interlocked so tight with the story that I can help feel a little bit manipulated after watching such a movie. Science says that observing a phenomenon changes it's very nature and I can't help but think of Capote as a prime example of that. Watching him watching Perry Smith made me cringe here & there. It's good, yet it's too good to be true. It would be amazing as fiction, but as a true account of a true account of events, I'm left perplex.
SCORE: 72%
