Philip Seymour Capote

Rating: 9/10 (19 March 2006)

I finally got to see the Best Actor performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman as the late writer and icon Truman Capote. It's based on the biography published in the Eighties entitled Capote by Gerald Clarke.
The only part of the book the film deals with is the creation and completion of Capote's landmark docunovel In Cold Blood. And the film is remarkably faithful to the details described in the book. In 1959 in his Brooklyn Heights apartment, Truman Capote read about the slaying of a Kansas family named Clutter in some small town called Holcomb. He decides to go west and investigate every aspect of this gruesome tragedy. That includes numerous interviews with both the suspects that are eventually caught, tried, and convicted.
With one of them, Perry Smith, Capote forms a strange relationship as he tries to get the real story about what happened in that Kansas farm house that night in 1959 by the only two left who can tell it. And Smith who is flattered by all the attention this celebrity is giving him. It's sad, but Perry Smith becomes almost a celebrity by reflection at a time when he's facing execution. Clifton Collins, Jr. plays Smith and it's a subtle piece of acting he does. We see a lost little boy in those scenes with Capote in prison, but we also never forget this man is a stone cold killer who went to this farm house in the mistaken belief that Mr. Clutter had squirreled away a large sum of cash because he didn't trust banks.
Not as foolish as you might think. In the generation before during the Depression when banks did fail, a lot of people lost their faith in financial institutions. In fact an uncle and aunt of mine had that happen to them before they passed on the last decade.
But the film belongs to Philip Seymour Hoffman. I first saw Hoffman on screen playing Scotty G in Boogie Nights. It was also a gay character, but light years from the sophisticated and glamorous Truman Capote. Scotty G was the backward kid who crushes out big time on Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights. Hoffman is an player of extraordinary range to successfully essay both Capote and Scotty G.
This was an extraordinary year in the Academy Awards with nominations going to performers who played real life people. Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, George Clooney as Edward R. Murrow, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote. And every one of them gave a performance that made me think I was seeing old film clips of their characters.
I recommend the film. As a story it can stand on its own. But I also recommend highly the book by Gerald Clarke. For those of you liked the film and like Philip Seymour Hoffman in the part, the biography Capote is a fascinating read, a glimpse into gay America, both pre and post the Stonewall Riots. And it's a good social history of the times.