CAPOTE (2005) ,,,,, Looking back at the 1950s in America

Rating: 8/10 (11 July 2006)

This is a VERY minority opinion. With respect both to CAPOTE and GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK, two look-back films of 2005 ,,,, I felt for both films a cloud of doubt. WHO CARES? Of course I care because I was alive in that era. More aware of Edward R. Murrow than I was of Truman Capote.
When I read IN COLD BLOOD, it ranked for me with TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and PEYTON PLACE (Yeah, I know). To a young kid, all three books were about times and places far way but credible. These places had to be true because the writings were so vivid.
As is reflected in the voting for this film, the 18-34 age group knows of Capote and Murrow only on an exception basis. I don't believe it is the norm to know about them. This would be true, also for Bobby Darin (BEYOND THE SEA - 2004) but not for Ray Charles (RAY - 2004). Ray Charles appears to be much better known.
Where does that leave POLLOCK (2000)? I can't say. I know in my public school, CAPOTE was discussed, very discreetly -- as if he had done something slightly wrong; but POLLOCK was unheard of. The broad middle class hungered for blood, but certainly not for bohemians from Manhattan / East Hampton who spilled, dribbled and spritzed paint and got paid for it.
"Bulah, do you KNOW what goes on in Greenwich Village?" To get a feel for the times, try MONA LISA SMILE (2003). We are all just looser and mostly better informed these days because there aren't so many heresies -- or at least the heresies are different.
Did this pallor of obscurity -- ALLEGED obscurity -- affect the films themselves? Well I found GOOD NIGHT to be crisp, credible, continuously interesting. Whereas I found CAPOTE to be a bit of a 'museum piece' right off.
The was a biography done for the A&E Channel about Capote with the title TRUMAN CAPOTE: THE TINY TERROR (also 2005). This documentary is rentable from NetFlix. I learned MORE from this documentary than from the film, because it covers a longer period of Capote's life. Thus the declines in his health and fortunes -- which for the most part occur after the film closes -- and which one learns about only from the CAPOTE bonus tracks, are perhaps easier to understand if you can get your hands on that 'Biography'.
All this being said, and the drift here is more negative than positive, THE FILM IS AN ACCOMPLISHMENT. Philip Seymour Hoffman, it seemed to me, "got it" just the way Jamie Foxx "got it" in RAY.
Even more than Hoffman, THE FILM "GETS IT." You weren't supposed to write about such things in such ways back in 1959, ,,,, and you weren't even supposed to 'go to the source' and know about killers and the like. CAPOTE helps to spell that out for us I think the strongest point in the film is the suggestion that Capote fell to the temptation of CREATING news by involving himself in it. (I don't want to create an unfair SPOILER here.)
That's another thing you weren't supposed to do back in '59. News believed itself to be dispassionate -- more like the 'scientific method' that we learned about in high school. To see how reportage has changed, you could compare the coverage of Watergate (ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN-1976) vs. Monicagate. Reporters seem now to have an 'obligation' to tidy up the news if it doesn't fit our icons. ,,,,, Oops, now that's getting into current heresies.
And, importantly, IN COLD BLOOD was a book, not a newspaper column. That gave (the real) Capote some 'elbow-room.' For some parallel film interpretations of random killings, a particularly lurid favorite of American journalism, you could compare to CAPOTE the film treatments of the Starkweather-Fugate murders. Check out Terrence Malick's BADLANDS (1973), and the disappointing STARKWEATHER (2004); or better the 1993 TV production with Tim Roth and the indelible Fairuza Balk, MURDER IN THE HEARTLAND,,,,, and viewed again from 30,000 feet in NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994). This latter film examines what the 'media circus' has become. And to it a degree, it all traces back to the headwater of Truman Capote's genius (or at least his flair.)