Anyone who makes a film about a
writer faces the perennial problem of transforming essentially nonvisual
material into entertaining moving pictures.
As the history of cinema
demonstrates, painters, sculptors, composers, singers, dancers, and musicians
provide rich, highly visual subjects for film; writing, on the other hand,
offers little in the way of surface attraction for the camera to dwell on. Few
writers lead interesting lives, to begin with, and the process of writing
itself usually depends upon such uncinematic conditions as solitude and
inwardness, which often translate into the dull activities of scratching one’s
head, pacing the floor, and looking out the window, sometimes accompanied by
unmusical groaning.
To tell the story of Truman Capote’s
composition of In Cold Blood, the
book that insured his permanent fame, the makers of Capote necessarily omit most of the actual business of the author
at work. Aside from a couple of obligatory scenes of Capote at the typewriter,
the film concentrates, in a virtually documentary style, on his encounters with
the people and subjects that inspired his examination of a mass murder in a
small Kansas town. It also shows, in a relatively orthodox, linear manner, the
ways in which the writing of the book transformed the writer’s life and art.
Capote discovered his subject by
sheer accident, in a brief report in the New
York Times of the murder of the Clutters, a prominent farming family in
Holcomb, Kansas. For inexplicable reasons, the effete social butterfly, the
lapidary stylist of New Yorker stories
and profiles, the precious writer of a fey sort of Southern Gothic, resolved to
embark on a book about an act of horrible violence. That decision led him, with
his friend, the novelist Harper Lee, to the bleak emptiness of Western Kansas,
and to a relationship with a pair of murderers, Richard Hickock and Perry
Smith.
Although Capote must have seemed as
strange as any alien invader to the folk of Holcomb and Garden City, his
cleverness, his sympathy, and his considerable charm enabled him to become
friendly with a number of people involved with the case, including the chief
investigator, Alvin Dewey. More important, when the police arrested the
killers, Capote also convinced them to confide in him, allowing him to form an
intense relationship with Perry Smith and inspiring the most significant work
of his life and career.
The film moves back and forth from
New York to Kansas, creating some easy contrasts between the chatter and
glitter of the New York literary establishment and the narrow lives and
unpretentious plainness of the windswept prairies. It also suggests some of the
ambiguities inherent in Capote’s aims and methods, his awareness of exploiting
the tragedies of the Clutters as well as the sadness of the background and
psychology that led Perry Smith to murder. With considerable honesty, the movie
shows that Capote only reluctantly decided to help the killers with their
appeals, since he realized that their hanging would really make the best
conclusion for his book.
The performance of Philip Seymour
Hoffman in the title role naturally must sustain the whole story, and it’s a
genuine tour de force. In what must
have been an exhausting effort, he re-creates exactly the author’s appearance,
the prissy mannerisms, the high-pitched effeminate voice — I know, I met the
man — and even, through the magic of the cinema, somehow assumes the
diminutive stature of the shortest writer since John Keats abandoned medicine
for the chancier and bloodier business of poetry.
At the same time, he gradually
reveals the several facets of the writer’s character, his combinations of
selfishness and generosity, kindness and arrogance, sweetness and crudeness,
even the complexities of his ambivalence toward the subjects and the writing of
his book.
Even audiences who have never read In Cold Blood or seen the movie version
or who may never have heard of Truman Capote should find the picture a
fascinating and instructive work of art. It illustrates the truth of Norman
Mailer’s remark that Capote’s relationship with the two killers constituted the
central event of his life; moreover, it presented an opportunity few writers
ever encounter, one that perhaps only Capote possessed the sensitivity to grasp
and the talent, tenacity, and, yes, the courage to exploit.
The filmmakers and their principal
actor deserve credit for reflecting the truth and anguish of that endeavor.
Capote (R), directed by Bennett
Miller, is showing at Henrietta 18, Little Theatres, Pittsford Plaza
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2005.
