Capote's Cold Blood

Rating: 10/10 (13 October 2005)

*Please don't read if you haven't seen the film yet.*
We must hear Philip Seymour Hoffman's name come Oscar time. He was born to play the role of Truman Capote and his exceptional acting ability is at its ne plus ultra in this film.
Having said that, I must say the story itself does a bang-up job of creating a very complex character. On the one hand we have a writer whose talents we admire and whom, as a person, most will find witty and terribly likable. On the other, we see a manipulator who consistently lies to his interviewee (Perry Smith) to gain his trust and thereby gather material for his book. Granted, Smith is a murderer who did indeed take the lives of his victims in cold blood. But Capote desperately wants, almost in a premeditated way, Perry and his accomplice to die--not for the sake of the family whom they murdered but for the sake of his book, which, without the killers' execution, has no ending. So, while his nonfiction novel "In Cold Blood" relates the story of a brutal, senseless murder and its perpetrators, the film "Capote," ultimately, is the story of Truman Capote's willed murder of the killers--the story of his own "cold blood." By the end he is clamoring, in a sloppy, drunken way, for their death. Yet (and here's the catch) he also cries--disingenuously?--at their execution.
What "Capote" gives us then is a complex narrative of a different kind of ruthlessness--that journalistic hunger for the story that must be written, whatever the cost. Hoffman, however, does not let us off that easily, for by the end, we really have come to like and admire Capote, to relate to him in some way, despite the decidedly unlikable things that he does. Which is what Capote himself wanted to do in his book--give a human face to human ugliness.