By Dee-Dum
Edited by shrrsshrr

[Editor's Note:  Yes, we did have another review about this movie in last week's edition.  Here is another take on it though.]

The film, Capote is about much more than Philip Seymour Hoffman’s remarkable impersonation of Truman Capote. As good as Hoffman’s performance is, it’s been done before; Robert Morse won a Tony Award playing Capote on Broadway. Capote works as both an historical document and as an examination of the psyche of one of America’s finest authors.

In Cold Blood can honestly said to be one of the seminal works of literature in the 20th Century. It presaged so much that was unfamiliar at the time: the explosion of true crime books; the tabloid voyeurism that pervades incidents like the Jon Benet Ramsey killing and the Scott and Lacy Peterson affair; reality shows such as Cops and Americas Most Wanted; the creation of the cult of entertainer as celebrity. It is hard to imagine an America so innocent that it would find the murder of a Kansas family shocking.

Capote traces Truman Capote’s efforts to write the book, first as an article for The New Yorker and then as a full-fledged non-fiction novel. Capote seemed an odd person to take on such an assignment. He was perfectly at home in the sophisticated, urban New York City of the 1960s, where he wrote novels like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In Kansas he stood out like a sore thumb. But in the film he uses his oddness to ingratiate himself to the locals, many of whom are awed by the presence of someone so well-known and urbane. He gets a wanna-be rebellious teenage girl to open up to him by confiding to her that people have preconceived notions of him that are wrong; he dazzles the wife of the local sheriff with his wit, even as the sheriff considers him to be nothing more than a smug, gay, big city writer, there to use the tragedy for his own purposes.

Truman Capote made a fundamental mistake with In Cold Blood, one that a writer of a true crime book would not make today - he befriended one of the suspects in the quadruple homicide. The film shows how it is only after becoming friends with Perry Smith that Capote realizes for his book to have an ending, Smith and his accomplice must die. He helps them with their legal defense at first, but then abandons them when he tires of waiting for their appeals to be exhausted.

That there was a toll on Capote is shown by the film’s coda that points out that Truman Capote never finished another book for the rest of his life. He not only had to wait for the killers to die before he could complete his masterpiece, but he had to lie to them, telling them he was still supporting their appeal and that he hadn’t thought up a title for the book, even after the lurid In Cold Blood had been chosen (a choice he told the sheriff about with great satisfaction).

Hoffman’s performance is remarkable, especially when you consider that in most roles he has been physically large while Capote was notoriously petite. He has Capote’s distinctive vocal quilt down perfectly. If there is a quibble it is that Hoffman does too good a job of mimicking Capotes façade, so that we rarely get a glimpse of the man behind it (this is the genius of David Strathairn’s performance as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck - somehow he conveys the doubts running through Murrow’s mind even as he [Murrow] is projecting an air of confidence and resolve).

Chris Cooper and Catherine Keener do fine work in somewhat underwritten roles as, respectively, the local sheriff and Capote’s boyhood friend Harper Lee (the author of To Kill A Mockingbird), who worked as his research assistant. One can see how people put off by Capote’s smugness would open up to Lee, who was much more down to earth.

The film is much more than the sum of Hoffman’s performance and deserves a place on the Top Ten list of any discerning critic. With Hoffman’s Golden Globe upset over Heath Ledger, perhaps the film will find a larger audience. When the film was released in early September, Hoffman was immediately pegged as an Oscar favorite, but with the subsequent release of Brokeback Mountain, Walk the Line, and Good Night and Good Luck, the buzz had diminished. With his victory at the Globes, the buzz is back.