Capote

Directed by: Bennett Miller

Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr, Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood, Bob Balaban.

Before its production began, Capote director Bennett Miller said that without Philip Seymour Hoffman there would be no film. It is to his eternal credit that he never wavered from this conviction as Hoffman embodies Capote and in retrospect, it is impossible to see anyone else in his place.

Though In Cold Blood is not a biopic, Hoffman’s performance is the film, he is simply stunning and no gesture can be accused of mere mimicry, from the camp, high-pitched, feathery voice, to the fey, dandyesque posturing, to the monstrous narcissism of the man, Hoffman’s performance is so masterful and totally mesmerising that this complete understanding of Capote is recreated in the audience and therein lies the genius of this performance. Through Hoffman's performance, we, the audience, are compelled toward sympathy for this most unsympathetic of egos.

Truman Capote shot to literary fame in the 50s through Breakfast at Tiffany's and dined out on it's merits for years amongst the heinous cocktail crowd ubiquitous to the New York scene at that time.
Capote was as much reviled as he was lauded and much of this mixed sentiment emanates from his moth-to-the-flame-like ambition toward the limelight which led him toward more "serious" work.
In November 1959, Capote sat in his New York office and cut out a small newspaper article on the brutal murder of a quiet family in rural Kansas by two psychopathic drifters, Bill Hickock and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr). These murders and the subsequent publication of Capote’s account of them sent shockwaves through middle America. Capote’s intention was to find the humanity behind these figures and he admits that his sympathy for one of them was so much it was as if, "we grew up in the same house, except that I left through the front door while he left through the back".
It is with Perry that Capote forms a special bond, half exploitative, half sympathetic, and it is this aspect of the film where the title, In Cold Blood, seems more fitting a description of the author's exploitative behaviour toward the derelict figures of Hickock and Smith.
Through a mixture of ingratiation, courage and persistence, local authorities granted Capote access to the two accused and over six years developed a relationship with the pair between the bars of a Kansas jail that lies somewhere between genuine empathy and wildly cruel manipulation.
There is a question asked in Capote over what is and is not employable in the creation of any masterpiece. The author treads this line in the search for his masterpiece that lead to Norman Mailer, amongst others, heralding him as the "most perfect writer of his time", while others derided him a callous fraud.

Miller has assembled an intimidating cast and with scriptwriter Dan Futterman and Gerald Clarke (on whose book the film is based), produces a resonant, chilling work that will stay with the audience long after the credits roll. Katherine Keener plays Capote's research assistant/moral sounding board, Nelle Harper Lee (who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird) and, as always, is excellent in providing down-to-earth humanity without which, Capote would have disappeared over a horizon of self-importance and vanity.
Keener is joined in the supporting cast by Chris Cooper, as the untrusting hand of Midwest law, and by Clifton Collins Jr, who confessed to be so tortured by the part of Perry Smith that he suffered more than a couple of breakdowns during filming.

Overall, this is a committed and serious film that is sometimes chilling, sometimes endearing and is an eerily beautiful triumph. The British Academy have already acknowledged Hoffman as one of the best actors of his generation by presenting him with his BAFTA and an Oscar must follow, anything else would be a glaring injustice on a man who has been confined to scene-stealing for far too long.
While this masterful breakthrough should cement Hoffman as the thinking-movie's leading man, Capote in contrast, after his masterpiece suffered writer's block for the rest of his life, indeed he never finished another significant work and died, twenty years later, at 59, a shattered alcoholic, in the shadow of his own masterpiece.