|
CAPOTE Send This Review to a Friend
The one time I met Truman Capote he seemed to be flying as high as a kite. In a great performance, perhaps the highlight of his career thus far, Philip Seymour Hoffman nails Capote’s off-the-wall demeanor as well as his serious side as an author and his ability to manipulate others to get want he wants for a book. It is a colorful and complex portrait, enhanced by Hoffman’s mastery of Capote’s high-pitched, squeaky voice, and the performance thoroughly dominates the new film, “Capote,” showcased at both the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival prior to its commercial opening.
The drama, directed by Bennett Miller, focuses on Capote’s writing of a magazine article that eventually graduated into “In Cold Blood,” a searing book that combined fact with literary embellishment exploring the story of a brutal murder of a Kansas family and trying to understand what led the killers to commit such a seemingly senseless crime. The book also was a thrust against the horror of capital punishment. Stylistically, “In Cold Blood” set a pattern for the genre known as the non-fiction novel. A powerful 1967 film adaptation of “In Cold Blood” was directed by Richard Brooks.
Central to the story of “Capote” is the relationship that builds between him and one of the imprisoned killers, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.)—the other killer, Richard Hickock, is portrayed by Mark Pellegrino. Capote both befriends Perry and uses him to foster his writing career, and he is sympathetic to the prisoner as well as dishonest with him. The ultimate execution is painful for Capote, yet, as interpreted in the film, he was impatient to get the case over with because his book could not be complete until there was finality.
Accompanying Capote on his investigatory trips is his friend, Nelle Harper Lee, soon to achieve fame herself as the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and Catherine Keener plays her with understated firmness. The film is rich in attention to detail, which creates a strong sense of period and the horror of what’s involved in the crime and the retribution that follows. One has some sympathy for Perry despite what he has done, and the ultimate hanging scene is chilling, as it was in Capote’s book. The film, however, doesn’t explore the relationship between Smith and Hickock with as much depth as the book achieved, but that’s understandable, given that the focus here is on Capote.
This is a consistently riveting work that ranks among 2005’s finest, and the buzz has already started about Hoffman’s likelihood of winning awards. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
|