Capturing the Creative Process Chez Capote

Rating: 10/10 (6 March 2006)

"Capote" creates an impression that doesn't easily wear off. The film tells how Truman Capote came to write his seminal work "In Cold Blood," which deals with the brutal murder of the Clutter family in Kansas in 1959.
The genius of this movie is its unerring exposition and its focus on the writer's creative process. Along the way, "Capote" offers fascinating, if thin, recreations of the Cool Jazz-fueled cocktail circuit of the early 1960s brownstone intelligentsia in New York City as well as an outsider's view of the more grounded yet aspiring "wheatfield soul" of rural Kansas (landscape by Manitoba).
Philip Seymour Hoffman reveals a Capote whose vulnerability has made him tough. Capote's vibrant, fey demeanor comes across at first as off-putting. But he is soon accepted by all because his consistency belies a force at once gifted and resolute. We realize we are dealing with someone who is determined to make sense out of a senseless aspect of human existence. It is not always a pretty sight. Capote manipulates his subjects and the people in his private circle in order to produce his book.
Lured out of the halls of The New Yorker magazine by the killings in Kansas, Capote crash lands in an alien sensibility. His fame is his credential, but he demurs in the face of the local sheriff (played with admirable restraint by Chris Cooper), who tells him fiercely, "I care," referring to the capture of the killers. Here are lawmen faced with bringing brutal murderers to justice. Art may be eternal, however both Capote and the sheriff know for sure that life is short. At the press conference, a duly subdued Capote stands, silent, in the back of the room. He is beginning to assimilate -- the first step in getting the real story.
When Capote calls his publisher in New York to ask for more money and for "Dick" Avedon to take pictures of the captured killers, it is the ego of the artist taking over. Without this selfish force, the book could not be created, but it remains a selfish drive to the end, nonetheless.
Meanwhile, Capote remains a cruel cut-up. This is his defense mechanism, to keep others from knowing his insecurities, from guessing at his depression. The writing process turns Capote inside out, and there is no way he wants to share that with anyone.
Instead, Capote regales his adulating listeners with name-dropping tales of boozy moments in exotic locales alongside cultural icons. More poignantly, he glibly deprecates the killers he has been cozying up to. Yet Capote's sincerity is apparent as he attempts to understand their story, which will become his book, and to help their cause as long as it dovetails with his opus.
A "necktie party" is how killer Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.) refers to his own impending death sentence; in 1965 Kansas still "hanged from a rope until dead" its capital murderers. Does anything emphasize more strongly the link to the Old West, especially as viewed by an arriviste member of the nation's cultural elite? Capote cleaves to his New York cachet; earlier he had denied that the subtle landscape of Kansas reminded him at all of his youth in the Deep South. He would rather see himself as a product of northeastern intellectualism than a bayou baby brought up in 'bama. His work on "In Cold Blood" forces him to reconsider his innermost self.
We are never truly moved to pity Smith, even though we are introduced to the accused in a humanizing environment, a kitchen that serves as an emergency detention cell. We are subsequently alienated from the convicted killer, whether by cell bars, his own attempts at artifice or the hangman's harness. The peculiarity of the outbuilding that houses the scaffold, to which the condemned are chauffeured in a roomy car, built "when Detroit still cared," further distracts from empathizing with Smith in his most helpless and final hour.
In days of yore the hangman might shake the condemned man's hand to judge his weight before adjusting the noose. In "Capote," Smith shakes the sheriff's hand before climbing the gallows. The scene reminds us of the sad truth that it is ultimately a weak man who would, as Smith's older sister told Capote in an earlier scene, "just as soon kill you as shake your hand."
Capote came to view murderer Perry Smith as a brother in spirit, and he confided this profound emotional tie to Nelle (Catherine Keener), his friend since childhood. After justice has been meted out in the Kansas barn, it is Nelle who refuses Capote's personal revisionism that he tried to stay the execution.
While the victims of the murders are not the focus of "Capote," the sheer brutality of the crimes is directly depicted in an abrupt flashback, lest we forget why these murderers have been ordered to forfeit their lives.