Tour de force for Hoffman- Mild spoilers, as if you don't know the story already.. come on!

Rating: 10/10 (12 December 2005)

If Phillip Seymour Hoffman does not get the Oscar for best actor, there is no justice. His total immersion portrayal of the brilliant but haunted child-like genius writer Truman Capote is a living homage to the late author. I sat in a small venue, so mesmerized was I that I was leaning forward in my seat propping an elbow on the back of the seat in front of me. I was with a friend, and the theater was lightly occupied. You could have heard a pin drop in there. Even the munching of popcorn or slurping of soda was kept to a minimum, nobody wanted to miss a line, or be distracted and miss a gesture.
The laughter from the audience was genuine, not mocking and very savvy. I was in a good group that afternoon.
The angst and dread and anxiety and the conflicting emotions of pride and revulsion mixed liberally with a sexual undercurrent so strong you would feel like being in a rip-tide, yet he knows his subject matter must die in order to fulfill his destiny as the first writer of "true crime" genre nonfiction.
You can taste the drinks, smell the cigarettes, see the depression overwhelm him as he realizes he must hope for death to consummate evolution to another level of creativity.
Interestingly, the color treatment of this film cleverly intersperses with stark high-contrast lighting to simulate black and white like the gory crime scene pictures or the press and publicity stills taken for the book, In Cold Blood.
I hate to say this, but Robert Blake will always be Perry Smith to me, even though Clifton Collins, Jr. does a marvelous job translating the child-like friendliness and simmering rage inside this cold blooded killer. Blakes Smith will always seem a bit more sensitive, terrified and at the same time exhilarated and turned-on by the whole spectacle of his murderous self-immolation.
The scene showing Smith staring out a grate in the wall to watch "Andy", the best boy in Kansas, swollen with self-indulgence waddling out to the "corner", trying to beat the rope by weighing enough to break it is a great homage to the original Blake "In Cold Blood". I thought the forklift for his corpse a nice touch.
This is a marvelous snippet of time, expanded and stretching the emotional fabric of the period in Capote's life to grab our attention and keep it wrung out like a wet rag....cold and damp, creepy almost but riveting, like a bloody auto accident. You can't look at it, and you can't look away.
Totally Awesome.