Great but Distracting Performance

Rating: 5/10 (21 December 2009)

Great performance, but there's something very myopic about this film--it's essentially a old- fashioned "whodunnit": the entire focus is on Capote, how he lies and how he manipulates Smith in order to arrive at "the truth" (i.e., the story of the murders). There is only the slightest suggestion in the film that Smith might be manipulating Capote (his paranoid remarks about Hickok), but those seem dismissed as irrelevant. Finally, after years, the Great Capote gets his man--Smith confesses, or gives his version of "what happened that night." It is obviously only a version, and a self-serving one--but the film presents this as The Truth (it's been forty years since I read In Cold Blood; I believe that is how Capote presented it in the book as well--I may be wrong here). But why would Capote need to know The Truth? Would he recognize it if he sat on it? Why should Perry Smith tell The Truth? Is what Perry Smith remembers The Truth? And the Truth for whom? All these questions could have been raised, and they're certainly familiar to even a Film101 student fresh from Roshomon. But not, apparently, to those who made the film, whose doting on Capote (and the great performance by Hoffman) kept them from dealing with any of these.