Hoffman is brilliant!

Rating: 8/10 (11 February 2006)

I came to this movie with only one intent: to watch Seymour Hoffman's performance. Truman Capote, the man, does not appeal to me. I found him to be a vainglorious, self aggrandizing prig! Would Hoffman's portrayal, which I knew from previews to be uncannily accurate about Capote's famously fey mannerisms, go into character, or stay in caricature? Could Hoffman escape his stolid, teutonic, appearance and become a mincing, literary mountebank? The plot goes as follows: Capote reads an article in the New York Times about a Kansas farming family of four found brutally murdered in their isolated farmhouse. Intrigued, for reasons unexplained, he gets the New Yorker magazine to send him to Kansas in search of an article. He is accompanied by Harper Lee, the author of the, yet to be acclaimed, novel "To kill a Mockingbird," who acts as his point man. Capote knows full well how middle America is going to react to an eastern "fairy," and he has Lee soften up the people he needs to interview. Once inside he takes over, winning people with his gift of story telling  mostly quite revealing stories about himself  and inveigles them to reveal details about the crimes.
His aggressive, and insertive, tactics are no different than any other of the paparazzi, but he does it with such panache and, due to his fame as an author, he gets away with it. He steals into the funeral home to take a morbid peek at the dead bodies  bizarrely cocooned by cotton face masks, to hide the shotgun damage  he bribes a Sheriff's office manager with books so he can have access to one of the murderers, who is imprisoned in a cell in an ante room. Expecting a monster, he finds instead a literate, soft spoken, artistic, half breed, who asks him politely for aspirin to ease the pain in his legs.
**SPOILER*** Hooked, he decides to abandon the article, and go for a book, the first non fiction novel. Aware that, if the men are executed, time will run out on his project, he hires a lawyer to mount an appeal, and manages to keep them alive long enough to milk the story. Using self revealing stories he gets Perry Smith, the articulate one, to open up about everything except the one thing Capote needs to finish his story: the description of the murders! We are so taken in by these conversations that we forget that it is between a writer, whose main aim is a story, and a sociopath, whose main aim is to stay alive. Both men are consummate con artists, so subtle in their skills that they only reveal enough to keep the game cloaked and ongoing. Perry Smith keeps mum about the murders, while Capote lies about his book's progress. Perry demonizes his partner, and Capote dutifully plays along, spending all of his time with Perry. Perry wants to know the title of the book, Capote lies and says he hasn't come up with one, knowing full well that: "In cold blood" will show his hand.
P.S. Hoffman's portrayal of Capote is an incredible melange of great impersonation and great acting! He is, in my opinion, a shoe in for the Oscar. While I was moved by Ledger's haunting work in Brokeback, I was awestruck by Hoffman. He wasn't just required to impersonate the pompous little gnome, he was required to make us wonder which Capote was the real Capote, or whether Capote changed personas with the context required of him! Does he care about Perry, or is he simply using him. When he cries on the eve of their execution, is he crying for them, or for himself? Then we add the interplay between him and Perry, and we have two actors playing actors. Both keep their true selves hidden in an intricate game of mutual manipulation. It is only in their final conversation that Perry confesses to the murders in a brief and brutal fashion, so brief that it never really shocks us out of the delusion that he, as his sister so tellingly says: "would as soon kill you as shake your hand." We never see a warm side of Capote, and from his retelling of his childhood, as a frequently abandoned, terrified child, we are left to wonder about how his persona is hidden away under the layers of melodrama. As Capote states to Harper Lee, when she asks him if he has fallen in love with Smith: "I feel we grew up together, and he left out of the back door and I left out of the front door."