Florid Wrappers

Rating: Null/10 (10 March 2006)

I hold certain films to a higher standard than others. "Fight Club" could have been important instead of merely threatening so. We have others that spin up wheels of competence in representing life but seem to lack any understanding of life itself.
So I am profoundly disappointed by this.
Yes, it has a good actor exercising the opportunity to be the center of a world that we see only through his eyes. I've followed him from "Twister," where he made that story all about himself by his quiet control from the corner.
And the thing does work in the way we obsess about celebrities, and revel in their quirks but only so long as we can understand those quirks and manage them in ourselves.
But the thing about this is how the world is delivered by an artist, how pieces of it can be sectioned out and packaged. What we see is the wrapper only, usually. Capote was all about wrappers where other writers -- the best ones -- are about the selection and sectioning of pieces.
So okay, movies are about wrappers too, because the best of them are self-aware and that self-awareness is about how they wrap life for us.
Capote was a cinematic writer, the first one unless you count Hunter Thompson. He'd impose florid visions on a substrate of ordinary life and sculpt a shape on those visions that made it seem as if the underlying matter of life had that shape.
He imposed style on fate, and gave us a whole new generation of possibilities for writers, mostly useless of course.
This is important stuff, the stuff of which you could make a great movie, especially if you have a team who understands. And Hoffman surely does understand this. Even in his most undisciplined moments like "Love Liza" he built a layer of wrapping and simultaneously pierced it. Its what I call folded acting, giving us two layers.
Now look at this movie. It is all wrapper, all style. It is a romance in the sense that you can slickly move your mind over the lubricated latex skin of the thing and never touch anything real. No nerves, muscle, juice.
There's the wrapper of the killer's world. Of the book Capote wrapped around that. Of the persona Capote wrapped around it in his fabricated person. Of the book Gerald Clarke wrapped around all of that. At each layer, these artists gave us means to touch the reality within. Now we come to the fifth wrapper, the one of the movie.
And it seals off all the reality. Was the hanging supposed to be that piercing? The snubbing of "Mockingbird?" The withdrawal from prison visits? Can any defender of this film claim so? Ask yourself what effect it had on you when Capote withdrew to Spain? Was it any different to you than when he withdrew to Manhattan? It was in all the other wrappers, because it withdrew the needles.
No needles here folks. Move along, nothing to see.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.