Little boy blue

Noel Vera

"Capote"--about Truman Capote's five-year quest to write a book on
the killing of a Kansas family, the friendship he develops with one
of the killers, and the consequences of that friendship--is
terrific, and light-years beyond what I would have imagined director
Bennett Miller was capable of. His previous feature "The Cruise" was
a documentary about an eccentric New York tour guide, and other than
the fact that both films train a largely unwavering eye on two
loquacious urbanites--one openly gay, one not so open (the tour
guide in "The Cruise" maintains that he's straight)--it's hard to
believe they were the product of a single filmmaker.

The subject and glory of the film, of course, is Philip Seymour
Hoffman's Capote. He gets most of the mannerisms down pat--the baby
whisper, the fluttering hands--and even manages to make himself look
smaller than his usual bulky self, but that's just the basics of the
performance; beyond the nuts and bolts, he builds a portrait of a
man who'll do anything--charm, bribe, lie, even tell uncomfortable
truths about himself--to get the information he needs to write the
book that will guarantee him literary immortality. This
interpretation of Capote owes much to Dan Futterman's screenplay, I
think (based on the biography by Gerald Clarke), and Hoffman runs
with it--no mean feat, considering that much of the details are
suggested rather than stated, and conveyed by the sequence of events
rather than semaphored via one character's privileged speech, the
way they are in most biopics.

Beyond Hoffman, the rest of the cast is terrific. Catherine Keener
is a warm (if underwritten) Harper Lee, playing Capote's Girl Friday
and liaison with the townsfolk, overall suggesting the kind of
compassionately levelheaded woman that might write a novel like "To
Kill a Mockingbird;" Chris Cooper's Officer Dewey is exactly the
kind of suspicious, stolid citizen you might meet in a small town;
Bruce Greenwood is modestly low-key as Jack Dunphy, Capote's
longtime companion; Mark Pellegrino is chillingly cynical and crude
as Dick Hickok, one of the two killers. Only Bob Balaban's Wallace
Shawn, the famous New Yorker editor who serialized the novel in his
magazine, seems off--from what I've heard, he's a lot more timid and
genteel in real life.

Clifton Collins, Jr., as Perry Smith (the other killer) doesn't have
Robert Blake's chilling eyes in Richard Brook's 1967 film version of
Capote's "In Cold Blood," he does however, complement Hoffman's
seductive candor with his own blend of sensitivity and neediness.

Perry and Capote's relationship is the focus of the film, of course;
I'd call this a less romanticized version of "Brokeback Mountain,"
where two men form a bond (experience friendship, perhaps even
love), meeting occasionally over several years, and one of them--
true to his character--proceeds to exploit said bond to his
advantage. Capote sees something in common with Perry, in that they
were two sensitive souls who had been neglected as children; he also
perhaps sees in Perry's psychopathic capacity to kill a reflection
of his own ruthlessness with regards to other people. Perry in turn
responds to Capote's attention hungrily, sensing someone who for
once might actually understand his situation (it never occurs to him
to wonder how Capote might use that understanding). As Perry's legal
fortunes wax and wane, the relationship accordingly blows hot and
cold, and it's fascinating to see how this affects Capote, to see
how Hoffman suggests his inner conflict: his Capote complains about
the difficulties of writing the novel, about his various aches and
pains (he was famously never fond of keeping his thoughts and
feelings to himself), about everything in the world except what's
really weighing down on his soul--the fact that while Hickock and
Smith are still alive, his novel has no ending.

It's interesting to re-watch Brooks' film adaptation, aware all the
time of an invisible presence walking through the corridors of the
Clutter house and sitting in the jail cell beside Perry, aware that
Capote had as much a role in determining the fate of the killers as
anyone else around them but never once mentioning himself. Probably
idle speculation on my part, but was this part of his strategy in
writing the novel, that he thought it would go over better if he
didn't insert himself (much less admit to what he did?)? Was it some
kind of penalty he imposed on himself, a kind of self-erasure (or
self-denial), in response to the guilt he felt for Perry?

The film has its minor flaws, as mentioned, and one major--like
Clarke's biography, it largely accepts at face value Capote's claims
to have invented a genre, the "nonfiction novel" (actually there was
John Hersey's 1946 "Hiroshima" and Luis Perez's 1947 "El Coyote: the
Rebel"), and of the book's literary stature (Norman Mailer's "The
Executioner's Song," for example, while heavily influenced by
Capote's novel, at the same time improves on it by including the
kind of critical self-awareness that Capote avoided). Like
Spielberg's "Munich," Bennett's film relies too much on the accuracy
of a single source (George Jonas' "Vengeance," in Spielberg's case).

That said, it's an astonishingly assured debut fiction feature for
Miller, a career-making performance for Hoffman as Capote, and one
of the best mainstream (or near-mainstream) films to come out in
2005.

An odd final note (please skip this paragraph if you plan to see the
film): Miller seems acutely aware of the physical act of breathing
in much of the film. Early on, we hear Capote huffing and puffing,
suggesting that in the ordinary course of life he has to struggle
(thanks, I suppose, to his alcoholism and health problems) to keep
up; at their execution we hear the far healthier Smith gasping
desperately, as if trying to store up enough air for the time when
he knows it will be totally cut off. When Smith drops--a startling
moment--Capote finishes his interrupted breath for him by exhaling a
long stream of air. It's a sigh of relief and a sigh of sympathy--
he's breathing because he can and Smith can't, and the film suggests
that that's a difference he'll carry with him for the rest of his
life.

(First published in Businessworld, 3/3/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)