Exceptional performance by Hoffmann in a superbly executed (pun intended) complex film

Rating: 10/10 (26 March 2006)

About six months after I was born in 1959 there was a terrible murder in a small town in Kansas. Truman Capote, probably the most noted writer in America at that time (having recently published the critically-acclaimed best-seller "Breakfast at Tiffany's") read about this murder in the front section of the New York Times. Capote decided he wanted to do an in-depth article on the crime for The New Yorker magazine.
He traveled out to Kansas with his childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee who had just written "To Kill a Mockingbird" but had not had yet gotten it published. He lived in this small town for several months, becoming friendly and familiar with the people there, interviewing everyone who would talk to him about the crime and the victims. Shortly after his arrival the murders were caught in Las Vegas and delivered to Kansas authorities. Capote managed to interview both of them and was immediately struck by the fact that there was much more than a magazine article under the surface here. He became so engaged with the events and the human beings involved in them that he devoted the next five years of his life to a singular book project which was to revolutionize literature as the first "factual novel." The results became his most famous work, "In Cold Blood." It influenced writers from the moment it came out, it still influences today. After "In Cold Blood" was published in mid-1960's, Capote never finished another novel. He became a severe alcoholic and died from complications of alcoholism in 1984. The writing of "In Cold Blood"  so the interpretation goes  killed him.
Capote is a film about the writing of the novel, the creative process, the obsession that motivated it, the lives that were affected by the act of writing it, and ultimately about how the novel changed its author even more than it changed the world of literature. Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Truman and deservedly so. It is, quite simply, the most astonishing performance I have seen in recent years by an actor. He captures the essence of the flamboyant, poetic, and insightful homosexual literary genius.
But, surrounding this performance is an aesthetic, intellectual, and technical construct of film-making that is rare today. The film runs for 114 minutes, is very slowly (but deliberately) paced, has many, many moments of extended pauses to allow the effect of the cinematography or the subtle, accentuated acting to take hold on the viewer. In quick time, however, it manages to generate a delicate intensity that I found captivating and entertaining.
Each moment in the film is allowed to happen in quiet refinement. Actors are allowed film space to just look at each other, they talk to themselves, the landscapes gone on and on in darkly toned contrasts, lines of dialog linger without an edit. The New York urban jazz party scenes heighten the sense of alienation brought forth and made apparent in the way comfortable literary society is contrasted with the gray earthiness of the criminally violent. Hoffman's Capote becomes deeply connected with both words and is able to translate that into an art form that traps the man and never lets him go.
Moment by moment this is allowed to build so that when the night of the murders is finally revealed to us in bright flashes of bloody horror it seems paradoxically at once brutal, grotesque, and subdued. Indeed their very pointlessness is perhaps the film's most shocking revelation.
This is a terrific film with a superb cast, writing, cinematography, and direction. All elements work well to engage the viewer and show how the contrasts and paradoxes between and within individual lives can shake a sensitive artist to his very core. In some sense, the film allows us to sample what that must have been like. To that extend, we may not understand Truman Capote but we certainly know his anguish. Those seeking resolution or absolution will be disappointed but then life seldom is neatly wrapped up for the sake of one evening's popcorn. This one's real.