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| 2005 NYFF Films Introduction Good Night, and Good Luck Regular Lovers The Death of Mr. Lazarescu Methadonia L'Enfant (The Child) Bubble The Squid and the Whale I Am Capote Something Like Happiness Sympathy for Lady Vengeance Manderlay Tale of Cinema Breakfast on Pluto Through the Forest The President's Last Bang Who's Camus Anyway? Three Times Paradise Now Tristram Shandy Gabrielle The Sun The Passenger Cache (Hidden) | Capote Bennett Miller, USA, 2005, 114 min.  This movie is a portrait of Truman Capote at the pivotal moment when he created the self-styled "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood that made him the most famous writer in America but was the last book he was ever able to finish. Hence itšs also the story of the bookšs subject, the Clutter family massacre in Kansas; Perry and Dick, their outcast murderers; and Capotešs intense relationship with Perry -- hauntingly played by Clifton Collins, Jr. As Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman is awesome: he's never been better. But unfortunately his spot-on recreation of Capote's whine and wit and self-absorption and brilliance and other complexly contradictory characteristics sucks the oxygen out of the rest of the picture. Though Catherine Keener is strong as Capote's initial sidekick Harper Lee and so is Chris Cooper as Kansas detective Alvin Dewey, it's always really all about Capote, who yet remains troublingly opaque. If you've read In Cold Blood and seen the movie made from it the massacre and its aftermath have already been powerfully recreated for you and the events of this new movie, though interesting as a quasi-literary character study, may seem relatively peripheral. What grabs you is Capote's tormented selfishness, the way his need to become famous and finish the book made him overlook how much the death of Perry would shatter him. The costumes and sets and visuals are relatively uninteresting; director Miller, who styles himself as fastidious, seems not to have cared enough about them. Capote sounds and acts so right you may not notice that he doesn't always look right: Hoffman's hands are big and fat and dirty-looking and his Capote is never even seen in a room that expresses his exquisite gay pack-rat personality. (Chris Knipp) |
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