Review of Capote (2005) by Markb. — 02 Dec 2005

This deceptively straightforward account of a significant period in the life and career of legendary author, raconteur and world-class eccentric Truman Capote is a classic example of the "warts-and-all" school of biographical storytelling: heavy on the warts, light on everything else.

In telling the tale of how Capote, in researching and putting together his "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood, his famous account of the random, senseless murder of a Kansas family by two drifters, ingratiated himself with the townspeople as well as the killers, writer Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller paint the writer as an ethically challenged opportunist and master manipulator whose long decline and demise after the book's success seem like a karmic payoff.

Like Kirk Douglas's unscrupulous newsman Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, who delayed attempts to rescue the victim of a mine disaster in order to stretch out the story, Capote is repeatedly seen playing around with the legal system in order to protract Perry Smith's and Dick Hickock's sentencing and time on Death Row and therefore buy himself extra time to artificially enhance the drama of the story and finish his research and writing.

Under the circumstances, the town sheriff (Chris Cooper), who knew the victims and is forced to watch Capote try to subvert justice on legal technicalities, is a model of grace and decorum under extreme provocation: I can see how even some partial proponents of the Miranda and Escobedo laws may want to see the lawman take a Buford Pusser-sized club to the intrusive, obsequious little pipsqueak.

And even if you totally oppose capital punishment in theory and practice, it's difficult to justify the emotional torture that Capote puts Smith and Hickock through, dragging out the inevitable rather than mercifully letting justice be speedy.

As far as the bestselling result of Capote's string-pulling is concerned, I think trash novelist and Capote foe Jacqueline Susann said it best (and had her finest moment ever) when she expressed her distaste for the book's unseemly sympathy for the killers on the basis that the unfortunate Clutter family was middle class.

(Richard Brooks' excellent 1967 film version, one of the very last big-studio black and white movies of the 1960s, was far more balanced in its view.) As screen bios go, I wish the film had been more cinematically exciting to watch, like last year's dazzling Kinsey or the current underreleased and underrated Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio; except for some chilling reenactments of the crime, it's too much of a talking-head movie too often, but the performances make it a must-see.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor with no sense of egotistical self-protection whatsoever (remember his unflattering role as a tubby porn-film crew member with an unrequited crush on Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, and let's not even go into what he was most famous for doing in Happiness!) adds dimensionality if not always sympathy to the title role and not only nails Capote's famously peculiar speech and other mannerisms, but even more impressively makes the viewer completely used to them in record time.

But equally good (if not even better) is Catherine Keener as Capote's friend and sometime assistant, To Kill A Mockingbird author Harper Lee, who also acts as Capote's final judge. I've always liked Keener, but found her characterizations in most movies rather too pigeonholed: in nearly everything from Walking and Talking to Being John Malkovich, she's too often played the sharp-tongued rhymes-with-witch.

But this year, in the otherwise mediocre thriller The Interpreter, the delightful comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin and now this, she's admirably expanded her repertoire: watching Keener redefine her screen persona playing tough-minded but big-hearted women in all three films is one of the major moviegoing thrills and treats of 2005.