A master-class in acting

Rating: 9/10 (5 March 2006)

Just let us forget for a moment that Truman Capote existed and that the character up on the screen is the invention of a scriptwriter's extraordinary imagination. Then let us consider just how fully Philip Seymour Hoffman has inhabited the role. This is a great performance by any standards. Hoffman convinces us that this devious, mendacious little man could exist and like some Machiavellian/Mephistopolean ogre could ingratiate himself with, well, just about anybody. It takes a tremendous leap of faith but this extraordinary actor makes it.
But hold on; Truman Capote did exist. That insidious charmer lived and breathed and wrote some of the greatest fiction ever to come out of America and he 'invented' the 'non-fiction novel' and with "In Cold Blood" he may have written the greatest example of the genre ever put on paper. So now Hoffman's task is all the greater. He must convince us that it is indeed the living, breathing Capote up there on the screen; like Victor Frankenstien he must give his creation life, and that is what he does. The limitations that most actors find imposed on them when they play a real-life character, (do they look like them, sound like them, have they got inside their heads?), Hoffman seems to have set aside, (though to all three of those questions the answer is a resounding 'yes'). Rather. he seems to exist outside of Capote, looking in on him, studying him. It is a master-class in acting.
But what of the film itself? It begins in 1959 on the day of the Clutter killings and ends some years later with the execution of the killers and the completion of Capote's book on the subject, "In Cold Blood". It is, therefore, not a biopic in the conventional sense of the word but a study of creativity and of celebrity. While we never see Capote pounding away at the typewriter we do see, in great detail, the painstaking way he achieved what he did, how he charmed (and lied) his way into the lives of everyone involved, in particular those of the policeman Alvin Dewey, (superbly played by Chris Cooper), and finally into the lives of the killers themselves, in particular Perry Smith, (another brilliant performance by Clifton Collins Jr). Some say Capote was in love with Smith; there certainly may have been a strong physical attraction on the writer's part, but on this reading Capote seems to have loved no-one but himself, or rather loved nothing but his own genius, his own extraordinary belief in himself.
The film suggests he was filled with remorse when Smith was finally executed and that he drank heavily afterwards, (he never completed another book), but he drank heavily before as well and his depressions were as much a symptom of his own vacillating creativity. Capote's own early life was troubled and his first novel, the brilliant "Other Voices, Other Rooms", written when he was only twenty-four, is filled with disquieting Gothic imagery. He certainly felt an affinity with Perry Smith, that their lives were not necessarily so different, but as he says in the film it was as if they had grown up in the same house but that he, Capote, had gone out the front door while Smith went out the back.
And by concentrating solely on a particular period in the writer's life, scriptwriter Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller, (hard to believe this is his first feature film), can delve deeper into what it is that makes Capote the man he is, can explore in depth the tiny sinews of thought that make up a great writer. And they are blessed with that great performance, the pinnacle of Hoffman's career to date, perhaps the finest example yet of the actor's art of making us believe that the person up there on the screen is who they say they are.