Hoffman's Truman is at most a 2-note wonder

Rating: 5/10 (29 October 2005)

I wish this were overall a better movie.
If you are not very familiar with Truman Capote, Nell Harper Lee, The New Yorker, To Kill a Mockingbird, or In Cold Blood, this film does not provide enough context. If you are, the movie feels incomplete and not very illuminating.
This is an actor's movie. Screenplay by an actor (Dan Futterman of Urbania and Angels in America on Broadway), produced by Futterman and Phillip Seymor Hoffman. All of the roles are played by actor's actors...people who are more well-known and respected among their fellow actors than the general public.
But all of the performances and the movie overall are just too somber and subdued. Hoffman's range runs the gamut from witty and subdued, sensitive and subdued, curious and subdued, and depressed and subdued. To gauge by what's on screen, Truman spends almost five solid years in an unrelieved state of quiet depression...apparently much of it laying in bed. No one in the movie ever shows anger or elation or grief or barely a hint of any passion of any kind.
Capote was larger than life and an important trail-blazer for gay Americans and for sissies in general. Unlike his contemporaries and sometimes rivals Tennesee Williams or Gore Vidal or James Baldwin, no one could ever, even for a second, pretend that Truman was anything but a flamboyant, very fey, homosexual. He was so overly and unmistakeably gay and sissified and yet so successful in New York and Hollywood literary circles that he likely did more for homosexual visibility than any other American during the fifties. He was a very passionate man...with enormous energy and love of life. He loved deeply, including his partner, the never successful writer and straight-appearing Jack Dunphy, he cackled, he loved beautiful places and interiors and worked hard to create comfortable environments for himself, he was a darling of some of the wealthiest socialites in New York and Hollywood...in all, an amazing life. We get barely a hint of any of that in Capote. Thus, the picture presented by the film is baffling...a man so consumed by his "art" that for five years he thinks about little else, never makes love, never enjoys anything...just broods.
Thus, the movie does not explore, I believe, some of the most interesting aspects of the creation of In Cold Blood. That anyone wrote that book at that time is astonishing. That Truman Capote...the creator of Breakfast at Tiffany's, the man who threw the most successful high-society party in New York, a best friend of Elizabeth Taylor...is triply so. The movie doesn't explore that contrast and barely gives the audience a sense of it. It would have been exciting to see Hoffman portraying Truman having a temper tantrum, or a really good time, or planning a party, or expressing love or affection for his partner, or enjoying life in some way.
All that said, Dan Futterman, after this film, should be named Fag-Stag of the year. I am gratified that even after playing gay for years on Broadway and playing gay in his most successful leading-man film (Urbania) and playing the son of two queens in The Birdcage, Dan, a straight man, remains interested enough in gay men to write a screenplay about Capote. However, while the choice to never directly examine or refer to Capote's homosexuality or anyone's reaction to it was an interesting one, it was the wrong one. While In Cold Blood has had no lasting effect on how Americans feel about prisons or criminals or Native Americans or the death penalty, Capote life and TV persona had a major and lasting effect on how many Americans viewed homosexuality. In a film named "Capote," not dealing with those aspects of his life is a major omission.