A Legacy

Rating: 8/10 (4 August 2013)

This is more of a character study than a biopic. Although, at their best, isn't that what biopics are anyway? The facts are the facts. But who were these people? We get a splendid impression of Truman Capote and we get fleeting impressions of everyone else in the film and how they related to Capote. Nelle Harper Lee actually interviewed the killers with Capote, and the film does something to acknowledge that she assisted in the research, but by the time Capote gets to the interview, Lee has lost her importance to him. The film implies that to him, she disappeared altogether. You see her occasionally, when he needs someone to jolt him into action, or you see his quiet lover Jack, fervently resting in the corners of his life waiting to be seen by him. Jack finishes a novel and Capote hardly notices. If Capote is at a party, he's either the life of it, or in a corner sulking and waiting on someone (Lee) to come coddle him so he can pontificate on how much torture it is to wait on the appeal (he can't finish his book until the killer's are dead). Lee accidentally wrote the greatest novel of the 20th century. Capote made sure he'd written the greatest nonfiction of the 20th century. Problem was, he set the bar so high for himself, he couldn't even go sideways. So, instead of writing something less deserving, he drank. The film is at fault in giving us the impression that the killer's affected Capote and that is the reason he never wrote again. I feel it makes more sense if he simply realized he had nothing better to offer the world than to continue being the life of the party. That's a difficult task to perform as the years roll by. Legacies take longer than life usually.