Capote is complex and revealing, and poignantly dissects a prominent literary personality.

Rating: Null/10 (2 April 2006)

"Cappote" completes a trilogy for me of 2005 movies with stunning narrative reveals. Joe Beuchas "Family Stone" strung out a mottle of thematic relations and dropped amusing hints and insightful clues like lemon drop candies before letting you walk into the big punch. The family stone is kind of sly. She is a rock with purpose that defines a high maternal consciousness which wives and mothers in pain are not unlikely to come to when faced with the pain of their own loved families, in telling them she is soon leaving this earth.
Ang Lee's "Broke Back Mountain" leads us to find, in the final analysis, a character's room back home where he grew up, of juvenile paucity. We re-look forward, skipping the superfluous details of Jack Twist's "formative" elements through to his adult passions. The emotional terrain is as profoundly simple and uncomplicated as the cinematic images which readily bear their breathtaking artistry. That artistry almost reminds how to breath when incorporating the sudden expansion of the narrative this last punch delivers. And Lee deliberately throws it.
"Capote." My first film review ever was as a college freshman on "Yellow Submarine." "Everything was as it should have been!" I declared fully unaware that an acid experience best shared is one better considered on its particular merits. So. What exactly does Capote-like mean? Phillip Seymour Hoffman does much more than act like Truman Capote if my memory of his appearance on the Cavat, Griffin era of afternoon TV entertalkment shows serves. His performance is Dorean Grayesque in the way that he shapes his character through mannerisms which themselves seem to deflect the world as it assaults his effete sensitivities, yet cannot bat it away. One wonders if he drank to get rid of the DTs which a sudden awareness of ego tender unrelentingly unleashed as he reconciled a "there but for the grace of God" ethos with his own relentless, gallant pursuit of a monster no one in their right mind nor out of a glass full of liquor should care about.
I knew nothing of Truman Capote outside his writing In Cold Blood, and that he was odd, queer in the way that people appear when they strain to look through thick glasses. Looking too close is a strain. Yet we get to look close comfortably and see someone actually withering under the strain of what he finds. He looks so close it is all suddenly around and he cannot find a blanket, only a bottle.
All the movies are studies in character, but Capote washes over in ocean waves, grandiose and powerful, receding and serene. Its psycho-dynamics fly from his opening oratorios, through his paying off the warden for access to his subjects and his vulnerability over his companion's taking off, to the whisper of an unfinished epitaph fished out of a sea of words from pages of his leftover book floating with posterity in the wake of an alcoholic life. Thrown from the bow, perhaps in a final release. In that sense, "Capote" is an epic production.
In the sense that people are powerful forces of their own destruction, Capote shows us how demons might be summoned in the life experience of the creatively indulgent, and why we should know to heed the vulnerability of the spirit to the narcissistic excesses of notoriety. it is not that we may call out to loneliness, but that loneliness can call out to us, reminding us, as a vibration to a moth closing on an innocent looking candle flame, reminding us that we can be our own worst enemies.