The Truman show.

Rating: 9/10 (22 October 2005)

Philip Seymour Hoffman, who we first noticed in *Scent of a Woman* some 13 years ago when he turned a fairly clichéd character into a memorable character study, finds his apotheosis -- some would say his inevitable apotheosis -- as Truman Capote in Bennett Miller's *Capote*. The writer died in 1984, and furthermore had spent the last 15 or so years of his life in relative seclusion, if you disregard his addled presence at Studio 54 and the occasional "Tonight Show" appearance. Therefore, to someone like myself, reared in the Seventies and Eighties and carrying no burning memories of the fellow, the exactitude of Hoffman's mimicry of Capote is neither here nor there. This is, above and beyond any caviling about how precise Hoffman's impersonation is of Capote, a full-bodied, well-rounded character, whose primary interest in serving the film is to make us consider the wages of art.
Older members of the audience, by which I mean those who remember the Sixties, may be forgiven a degree of burn-out: after all, there was Capote's book "In Cold Blood", the movie on which it was based, and the writer's own self-referential celebrity. Been there and done that? Not quite: this time, we view the story ABOUT the story from the writer's perspective. It is a credit to Gerald Clarke, who wrote the book on which the film is based, Dan Futterman, who wrote the screenplay, and director Miller that this well-worn material becomes urgent and interesting again. On a wider social level, *Capote* makes a damning statement about our current fascination with "true crime" stories, which had been reinforced by Norman Mailer's "Executioner's Song" in the Seventies and has finally become noxiously regnant with cable TV's endless hours of coverage of the Peterson case and others like it. I'm not suggesting that people were not interested in this tawdry material before Capote, but the movie implicitly blames him for the shameless modern-day intertwining of writers (or TV reporters) with the crimes and criminals that they're covering. The movie also has something to say about how self-centered writers can be: Capote can only say "What's the fuss all about?" in reference to friend and fellow novelist Harper Lee's success with "To Kill a Mockingbird". After watching Smith and Hickock get hung for their crimes, Capote whines, "I'll never get over it" -- to which Lee (played by the great Catherine Keener) replies with deadpan malice, "You're still ALIVE, Truman." Amen!
However, Capote's self-pity also contains the mere truth. *Capote* is the tragedy of a man who scrapped his own decency in order to write one of the great American novels of the 20th century. We observe the incremental milestones along the path toward greatness and damnation: Capote ingratiating himself with the Kansas locals; befriending the more sensitive and intelligent of the two murderers, Perry Smith; helping to arrange appeals for the murderers so that they'll stay alive long enough for him to collect enough information to finish his novel; smoothly lying to Smith about what he's actually writing about the case, even down to the book's title; and finally living with the consequences of his exploitative behavior. Art is achieved with devastating cost to the artist. Of course, this theme isn't exactly new, but Philip Seymour Hoffman makes it visceral with a performance containing a kaleidoscope of human behavior: cocky and in his element with his high-brow drinking pals in New York; smooth and charming as the "funny fag" stereotype (modeled on characters in the Thirties' films of Ernst Lubitsch and others) in Sheriff Dewey's home; gentle and nurturing to, and even spoon-feeding, Perry Smith during the latter's attempt at suicide-by-starvation in prison; abruptly turning the tables on Smith when Smith continues to remain close-mouthed about the night of the murders. This latter scene, in which Capote lashes out at his subject in that carefully modulated castrato voice of his, will go down in the annals of film history as perhaps the prime example of just how much contempt one human being can demonstrate to another. Granted, Perry Smith was an abomination of a man who deserved execution . . . but Hoffman's icy contempt still stabs us. Inhumanity is not always physically violent.
A difficult film. You will walk out of it feeling uncomfortable and contemplative. There's still some time remaining in the calendar as of this writing (10/22/05), but I doubt I'll see a better American movie this year. 9 stars out of 10.