Deborah Lipp

Capote (2005) 9/10
Author Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman), accompanied by his friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), travels to Kansas to research the brutal slaying of a family of four. He befriends residents, investigators, and eventually the killers while writing the “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood.

When we see a documentary, we sometimes forget that someone is holding the camera. When we read an article, we might forget that the interviewer was there, shaping the questions asked, and nodding or smiling or frowning. (And who among us doesn’t adjust what we say in response to the smile or frown we see?)

In a way, Capote is about that essential dishonesty of journalism. Truman Capote is the Heisenberg of this story, the observer who changes the experiment. As he befriends, as he sympathizes, as he acts or refrains from acting, the story about which he writes responds. Is it honest? Is it ethical? And who is this person who can befriend a murderer, hoping for a stay of execution so that interviews can continue; hoping for a final decision so that the story can have an ending?

Hoffman gives Capote enormous nuance. The title character is a towering narcissist, the shock of seeing the bodies of the slain is his shock, the agony of waiting for execution is about him, about his story, and like all true narcissists, he never even notices that his perspective is skewed. Capote feels sorry for himself, he agonizes, he weeps, and yes, he truly cares. Ultimately, he cares much more about the killers (particularly Perry Smith, played by Clifton Collins, Jr.) than about the victims or the survivors, but he cares about Truman Capote most of all. Yet Hoffman gives us enough of the inner man that we don’t despise him for it.

Catherine Keener has what I would normally call a thankless role, but she has received an Oscar nomination for it. She is solid, and self-contained, and functions as a mirror into which Capote can look (and in which we, the audience, can see him).

I am a poor reader. I don’t visualize well, and I tend to read the surface of books instead of experiencing the sub-text (whereas in movies, which visualize for me, I see sub-text all over the place). Thus I was more than halfway through In Cold Blood before I realized that Capote’s presence in the work was palpable, even though he writes with clinical detachment, as if he was not there.

In Capote, the title character is everywhere. He is the fourth wall which his book tries valiantly not to break. During one scene, Capote has dinner with the Dewey family when Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper), Kansas Bureau of Investigation chief, receives a crucial phone call. As I watched that scene, remembering the same scene from the book, I thought “He was there? He was right there?” Now, in reality, maybe he wasn’t for that call, but many moments, which I had imagined were derived from interviews, transcripts, police records, diaries, and so on (all of which Capote had access to) were, in fact, witnessed and participated in by Capote himself. This idea, of being an “invisible” spectator, and yet so utterly visible—he’s Truman Capote, fercrissake, flamboyantly gay, magnificently overdressed, lisping and whispering through the Kansas farmland—is the movie’s heart and soul. It changes Holcomb, Kansas, it changes Capote, and ultimately, I think, it changes the audience.