An Acting Tour de Force

Rating: 9/10 (28 January 2006)

I saw this film at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival. Philip Seymour Hoffman is one of my favourite actors, period. But he's usually known for character roles, and so he's not quite the household name he deserves to be. And sadly, because this film probably won't have wide appeal, he might remain that way. The truth is that he's one of the finest actors working today, and this film is a tour de force. Hoffman inhabits the role of Truman Capote, nailing everything from his childlike voice to his fey mannerisms, even down to his facial tics. He's almost too good, which may distract a bit from the other charms of this film.
If focuses rather narrowly on the time Truman Capote spent writing his most famous book, In Cold Blood. After a family of four is murdered in their remote farmhouse in Kansas, Capote decides to write an article for The New Yorker. After the two murderers are apprehended, Capote begins to form a bond with one of the men, Perry Smith (portrayed with amazing subtlety by Clifton Collins Jr.), drawing parallels between his own troubled childhood and that of the career criminal. The proposed article is abandoned, as Capote realizes he has the material for a book. And not just any kind of book, but a whole new kind of writing, what Capote calls "the nonfiction novel."
As the months drag on after the men's convictions, Capote keeps trying to draw Smith out, asking him to tell him about the night of the killings. When he finally does, it's uncomfortable to watch, not only for the brutality of the murders, but also for the way that Capote uses Smith for his own ends. It's clear that there is an inner conflict going on in Capote's mind. On one level, he really does befriend this killer. But he also uses him for material so he can feed his huge ambition and ego. His duplicitous nature is just another thing he has in common with Smith.
But after several years of research, at the end of all the legal appeals to spare the killers' lives, Capote is relieved to hear they'll finally be hanged. It's the only way he can finish his book. However, the experience of actually watching the executions shakes him deeply. His jumbled mixture of feelings and motivations went on to have a profound effect on Capote, and although the book does go on to become his most successful, he never finishes another. The film ends by quoting the epigraph to his final, unfinished manuscript, Unanswered Prayers. It was Christian mystic Teresa of Avila who said that "answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered."