Suspense From The Art Of Writing? Capote Does The Impossible!

Rating: Null/10 (23 October 2005)

This is a very deliberately paced story following Truman Capote as he researched and wrote In Cold Blood. Beginning when he sees a small article in the New York Times describing the shotgun killing of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas; Truman Capote for some reason thinks there is something broader and more meaningful to write about in this simple murder case than meets the eye.
He was more correct than he could have imagined. As he explains in the film, there is the whole conservative, safe, behaved part of American society that we idolize and then there is a depraved, uncontrollable, violent part not very far beneath the nice surface and these two extremes met on the night of November 14, 1959 in an isolated Kansas farmhouse.
The screenplay by actor Dan Futterman (Urbania, The Birdcage) is well written; not just in story structure (he actually builds suspense while waiting for Capote to write)) but especially in fleshing out the characters. Maybe there is a little skimping on the character of Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper), the Kansas police guy who is in charge of investigating the killings, but it looks to me like there was more shot for the film and it just got cut out to make a more agreeable running time. The film does seem long and it is over two hours.
Still, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is mesmerizing as Truman Capote. Truly, this is not just an impersonation of him, which would be easy to do given Capote's fluttery hand gestures and high-pitched voice. In real life, Truman Capote became such a caricature of himself that he was even made fun of in Woody Allen's film Annie Hall when, playing himself as a passerby in Central Park, he was ridiculed as coming in second in the "Truman Capote Look A Like" contest. This is a very controlled performance that must have been a bitch to achieve, but Hoffman never lets you see the sweat. He is so totally in character that even in such throwaway moments as Capote watching a taxi pull away or looking around a hotel room, he is spot on.
Hoffman is so good; you might forget there are other people in the cast. Catherine Keener as childhood friend of Capote and novelist Harper Lee (To Kill A Mockingbird) is her usual quiet strong self and Clifton Collins as Perry Smith is not as terse and "psycho" as Robert Blake was in the same role in the film of In Cold Blood. Collins plays him as more of a sly charmer in this film and you can see why Capote was attracted to this muscular, tattooed convict. As cult film director John Waters claimed, there is something about a prison sentence that makes a man sexy. But Perry Smith is really just as much a user of people as Capote is, except that in this situation, Perry Smith is manipulating people to save his life; Capote is just doing it for a book.
There is a palpable sense of how Truman Capote changed the art of writing, but maybe that's because I'm a reader and I know what Capote has done. Will someone for whom there is no American culture until Star Wars get a lot of the time period details and meaning? I don't know?
One wrong period detail that stuck out to me was during a long conversation Capote has on a telephone and the phone handset clearly has an RJ11, four-pin jack on it. It may seem minor but those "Registered Jacks" were not in use until 1976 and this scene takes place in 1961. Still, I was only momentarily bothered by this. Errors like that are inconsequential if the over-all film is worth watching and Capote most definitely is.