CAPOTE is a movie of conflicts and contrasts

Rating: 9/10 (17 November 2005)

The opening shot shows the sober silence of a Midwest Sunday morning. The quiet idyllic countryside with the stand of trees on the horizon as the divider between properties in contrast to the brashness of the city with the row of wrought iron railings dividing the brownstones. The unhurried pace, soft palette and rounded corners of country life in contrast to the city life with it's hard edges and sharp corners. A visually stunning way to begin a film about a man who sets out to write a book about the power of destruction that an act of violence can have upon a small Midwestern town where things like this just don't happen. A visually subtle way to begin a movie that ultimately reveals the conflicts and contrasts between our past and present worlds.
As a writer, Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) was a keen observer of people and found ways of getting people to tell him things they probably never would have, or should have. Of Laura Kinney (Allie Mickelson) he observed that she would be now and forever looked at and thought of differently, Truman had always been looked at and thought of as 'different' and so in his feeble attempt at compassion, he tells her of his experience of being 'different' to help put her at ease. You see the girl process this and she goes off to get Nancy Clutter's diary as we see Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) look at Truman with a mixture of amazement and disapproval. We see him locate the most vulnerable spot of his subject and then pick at it like a scab until the wound begins to ooze the material he needs for his book. Truman made no apologies and Philip Seymour Hoffman's Truman doesn't either. He knows who he is and he is fully aware that he is lacking in sincerity yet there is no guilt or apologies offered because he's not trying to make you think he is anything other than what he is, unabashedly and shamelessly self-serving.
The film doesn't spend a lot of time on Truman's relationship with Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood) but it spends enough time to let you know that this was mostly a give and take partnership - Truman would take whatever Jack was willing to give. There was some genuine affection between them early in the story but we see how Truman's experience with Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) takes a toll on that relationship and on Truman himself. The deeper his involvement with Smith the more withdrawn he becomes with Jack. We witness Truman's destruction and devolution throughout the process of writing this book that initially he thought would make him but essentially destroyed him. His drunken self-indulgence and insecurities show during the scene of the premiere of "To Kill A Mockingbird" written by his friend, confidant, and research assistant, Nelle Harper Lee. There were a lot of elements to the real story that the film's running time just did not allow to be fully developed or discovered; I would be interested to see follow-up movies, not really sequels, that take a closer look at some of these elements, such as, what happened to Jack Dunphy and Nelle Harper Lee? And what about that other death row prisoner, Lowell Lee Andrews (C. Ernst Harth) who brought home the cold hard truth that Smith and Hickock were next in line for the hangman's noose, what was his story? I know the history of the Midwest is rich with stories similar to this and I think Bennett Miller and crew have the eye and sense it would take to make these stories come to life in as richly textured a way as they did with CAPOTE.
This is a good story and among it's strengths is the superior acting, photography, costuming and set decoration. It is all so well done that at times I wasn't sure if I was seeing the actors or the real people. The town felt as though it had been shocked into a state of suspended time and never moved on, it was eerie in that sense. There was real commitment within the production and it shows.
I have seen this movie twice and both times the theatre was sold out and the audience was captivated and silent from the beginning of the movie all the way through the credits - now that is the mark of a well told story!