An actor crucifies his lines and everyone raves

Rating: 1/10 (27 May 2006)

Truman Capote spoke clearly. I saw him on TV. He enunciated his words and everyone understood. Sadly, in "Capote", that is not the case. Hoffman chews up almost every line in the script, butchering the movie. Just look at his mouth when you can see into it. His tongue is curled up over his palate, a contortion Hoffman seems to feel is necessary to carry off his impersonation. He lithps, contorts his vocal cords, and has paralysis of the lips all at the same time. The result: virtually none of his lines is fully comprehensible from beginning to end. Effectively, Hoffman throws away his role in order to pull off an impersonation, and his lines go down the toilet as well. It's no wonder at all that he did not receive an Oscar for this sad waste of a good role. All in all, this is a sordid production, with a depressing ending. Capote, a minor writer who enjoyed a bloated celebrity status in the bubble of Manhattan, thought he saw an opportunity in the Clutter killings far off in the hinterland. Exactly what originally attracted him must have been homosexual, but the director makes no effort to explain. Dominick Dunne's attraction to high-society murder cover-ups made a lot more sense. Perhaps Capote thought he could make fun of the hicks. Sadly for him, he fell in love with one of the convicts. The photographs of the two men shown in the film were clearly of pornographic interest to a homosexual. The prison visits also had lurid homosexual overtones, but the director ignores this blatant aspect of the case. Capote spun the imprisonment out so that he could extract from Smith an unexpected confession. It turned out to be a shocker. His love object and not the unpleasant other man, had performed all the murders, for just 40 or 50 dollars. The film somehow fails to live up to this revelation, perhaps because it cops out with explanatory flashbacks instead of powerful dialogue. In fact, the only man in this grim affair who was going to make big money out of it was Capote himself. In a kind of stupor, he attended the hanging of his confidant. He became seriously depressed by his own cynicism and eventually drank himself to death, never completing another book. The movie is directed on auto-pilot and seems to fail to understand the implications of a lot of what it tells, above all the homosexual aspects. Its financial success seems to have been achieved by word of mouth, with only a couple of dozen cinemas carrying it at the launch and the studio getting it into more than a thousand a couple of months later. Perhaps the gay market carried it alone. It's hard to imagine anything so depressing appealing to any other sector of the public.