One of the great directorial debuts I've seen in a long time

Rating: 10/10 (3 March 2017)

Bennett Miller's "Capote" was his first movie as a director and it is one of the best movies that I have seen that were directed by him (my favorite being "Moneyball" (2011)), and the movie ranks with "Reservoir Dogs" (1992), "12 Angry Men" (1957), and "Heaven Can Wait" (1978) as one of the best directorial debuts I have ever seen. The movie focuses on Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) while he was working on his most famous book called "In Cold Blood" about a mass murder in a small town called Holcomb, Kansas on November 14, 1959. After Capote hears about the crime in a "New York Times" article he decides he wants to write an article about it and very early into his research process he decides that there is too much information for an article and it is right to write about it as a book which is what he tells his editor in chief of "The New Yorker" William Shawn (Bob Balaban). Capote's partner in the research is another author who would write her first novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" which is Harper Lee (Catherine Keener). Then we see Capote and Lee take a trip by train from New York to Kansas to meet with a policeman named Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) in order to get more information about the crime such as crime scene photographs as well as who committed it in order to put that into his book. During the course of the movie Capote and Lee also meet Alvin's wife Marie (Amy Ryan) and they have a good couple of visits together. Then Capote meets the two men who committed the murders Dick Hickock (Mark Pellegrino), and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) and then he starts to befriend them both and fight hard to get them off of death row. While I was watching this movie during the scenes where Capote was trying to get these two men off of death row because he wanted to get more information from them for his book reminded me a little bit of Michael Clarke Duncan's performance in "The Green Mile" (1999) in the ending scene where he was crying before his electrocution. Hoffman's Oscar winning performance in this movie was so good that I felt as if Truman Capote was actually resurrected into Hoffman's very body and Dan Futterman's screenplay did a very good job on focusing on the characters of the movie instead of making the criminals look like morons. The most effective scenes of the movie are the scenes where Capote is talking to the two convicts on death row and all of those scenes are filled with so much emotion that you actually feel empathy for Hickock and Smith. Bennett Miller's direction for this movie as well as "Moneyball" (2011) made me even more excited to see his latest film from a few years ago called "Foxcatcher" (2014). This was a great movie and is one of the best movies of 2005.