Just about perfect

Rating: Null/10 (5 March 2006)

It's very rare that I watch a film that truly mesmerizes me. It's even rarer for me to write a review that doesn't have me reaching for the thesaurus to find synonyms for "cliché". I often feel that everything I watch is just a re-hashing of something else (possibly a sign of encroaching middle age?). But I truly thought this was one of the best films, and one of the most original, that I've seen in a long time. I don't know enough about Truman Capote to be able to comment on the veracity of Philip Seymour Hoffman's interpretation of him. But you don't need to be a Capote expert to appreciate the film or the performances, because it stands by itself as an interesting portrayal of a writer and the writing process. I really can find almost nothing to criticize  very unusual for me, cynic that I am! The story is simple and true. It's 1959, and four terrible and apparently motiveless murders take place at an isolated farmhouse in Kansas. An entire family wiped out brutally. Truman Capote, already a successful novelist and screen writer, reads about the murders while in New York and, intrigued, decides to go to Kansas to investigate not just the murders, but the background and the whole process which produces a man  or men - who could do such a thing. Not so much a Who Dunnit? as a Why Dunnit? The effete New York socialite hardly blends into the small Midwestern town, so he takes his best pal Nel Harper Lee, herself about to become famous for To Kill a Mockingbird, to act as an assistant. The murderers are quickly caught and put on trial, but that's only the beginning.
Over a period of five years, through appeals and stays of execution, Capote extracts from one of the murderers, Perry Smith, the guts of his most famous work, In Cold Blood. Switching between Capote's New York life, and the stark, grim prison within which Smith is awaiting execution, we watch the relationship between them develop and try to assess who is using whom. Capote wants his book, his story, his adoring public and his satisfactory ending  the explanation for the crime. Smith wants a decent lawyer and repeated stays of execution and maybe the recognition that he is someone, not just a nobody.
If Capote cruelly manipulates and uses Smith for his own literary ends, then Smith keeps him waiting, for that crucial exposition of what took place inside the house on the night of the murders. Smith appears intelligent and artistically talented but warped by childhood neglect. Capote himself had a miserable childhood, and realizes how easily their roles could have been reversed. In the end there is never any doubt that the men were guilty, but maybe  or maybe not  Capote has fallen in love with Perry. Certainly he never finished a book again after this defining period of his life, and he died of the side effects of alcohol. Did he enjoy some kind of icey pleasure from seeing Smith hang? Was he utterly amoral in his approach to using Smith as the source for his book? The performances are all outstanding, not just Philip Seymour Hoffmann's, but the supporting actors too. I thought the cinematography excellent, and I wouldn't have changed a single word of the script. We see the patronising attitude of 1950s men to women and the clever, arch and artsy society within which Capote moved, and wince that, for my age group at least, this may look like another age, but it's all so close to home. Very good. Very, very good. If only more people had seen it. Addendum: I've now seen the second Capote film, Infamous. That too was excellent but personally, I think Capote just has the edge. A purely personal opinion.