Hoffman brilliant in otherwise lackluster film

Rating: 5/10 (23 October 2005)

I really wanted to like this movie. But it was doomed to start, since I found myself repelled by Capote, and sympathetic towards Perry Smith. This is not the fault of the script, since Capote was so much the odd narcissist in reality, I just found myself removed and uncaring for anyone by the end of the film, and no matter how true this is to life, I don't want to sit through any film and not care about any of the characters. Thats not to say it was bad either. Philip Seymour Hoffman will win the Oscar for this role, his performance was the single light in the whole film, if he had not been in it, it would have failed entirely in my mind. He drove the wagon here, and everything else just came off like background noise. I read In Cold Blood, which I thought was brilliant, then I saw the film and didn't enjoy it as much as everybody else seemed to. Same goes here, I read his biography, loved it, and didn't think it translated into film. It was simply meandering and boring and at times over-dramatic for my tastes - I love slow, moving thoughtful pictures, and in a land inundated by floodwater, it was definitely refreshing to see 'Good Night and Good Luck' and 'Capote' in the same week. But I found this sprawling, poorly edited, beautifully photographed in neutral tones that only served to match the distance I felt from all the characters and the story. And I was extremely disappointed by one scene of gratuitous violence: The climax and one of the best acted monologues I've seen in a while takes place in the prison where Capote is interviewing Smith and has finally gotten him to talk about the night he murdered the Clutter family. Clifton Collins Jr, whom I had never seen before was incredible, and speaks with raptured intensity, while the camera centers on his sunken eyes. This was literally the first time in the film I was entirely captivated, Then, there's a flashback and some fancy jump cuts and you're taken to the night of the murders where we see him committing them. I found this entirely unnecessary in the context of this film. While the violence in the flashback was restrained compared to other violent films, it de-captivated me and contaminated the rest of the experience. I'm not against violence in pictures, but I'm against bad decisions made by directors. I could not find a purpose for it. We are for the entire film in Capote's head, seeing everything from his perspective, so why now are we suddenly inside Smith's head? Is it supposed to show some kind of transference that occurred between them in that moment? Did he psychically transmit those images to Capote's head? Or was it just to shock the audience? If it was it did just the opposite, it turned an otherwise disturbing and effective monologue into a novelty, my imagination is such that I believed for that moment that Collins was Perry Smith, and that he had murdered those people and I was really feeling the pain that both of them felt during that confession, and the moment it flashed back and the music started up we're back in movie land. Utterly confusing. See it for Hoffman.