Say it ain't so, Tru. Say "Capote," and everything it stands for, is a sham. Say you weren't a tortured, sad little guy who just so happened to scribble out some of the most influential prose of our time, before you flamed out. Confirm what we've always thought about you: that you were a bitterly funny auteur who threw swinging parties and got to hang out with the best and the brightest of the New York literati scene. God, that must have been fun. It was fun, right? Restore the faith, good sir. Tell us how much you valued your craft. Don't let us think that you just stumbled into your defining work, "In Cold Blood" on a tip from a flunky like William Shawn. Say you weren't this selfish, this tortured, this … boring. Tell us you did due diligence as a reporter and didn't enter into some sort of ink-stained Faustian bargain to get The Story. Come on, Tru: journalism majors need heroes, after all.
Alas, Truman Capote isn't alive to defend himself, which is a shame, because he takes quite a beating in "Capote," the new film from director Bennett Miller, based on a book by Gerald Clarke. It stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman ("Magnolia") as Capote, which would have been good casting if the movie did not systematically tear the Capote character down, reducing him to a pitiful wreck — a tortured, shallow, egotistical prig, a man who lost his soul writing a book. This, of course, may have been the case, but the man was still brilliant, as his writings show. None of this brilliance comes through in the movie as it did in the book. Watching this film, it seems inconceivable that a man like this could have written something as powerful as "In Cold Blood" or "Breakfast at Tiffany's."
The film recounts Capote's writing of "In Cold Blood." By now, the story of how he wrote this book is pretty well-worn stuff, especially to anybody who has completed a freshman English class. Truman Capote rolled into the small town of Holcomb, Kan., in November of 1959, with the task of writing a quick article for The New Yorker about the vicious murder of Holcomb farmer Herb Clutter, his wife Bonnie and their children Kenyon and Bonnie. He had his article all ready to go: it was going to be a quickie, human-interest story about how a small rural community was dealing with the aftermath of a gruesome crime. He was supposed to be back in New York within a few weeks.
Then something strange happened: Capote got hooked by the story and by the young men who committed the crime, ex-cons Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. He spent years in Kansas, along with his childhood friend Harper Lee (played in the movie by Catherine Keener of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin"), documenting the aftermath of the murder, Smith and Hickock's trial and their subsequent execution. He got to know everybody involved in the case: the Clutter's friends in Holcomb, from investigating officer Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper, "American Beauty") to, perhaps most famously of all, the killers themselves. The complete book was serialized in The New Yorker throughout 1965, and was eventually published in book form in 1966 to both critical and public acclaim. A movie soon followed. Capote, though, was never able to write anything substantial again: he had left his soul in Holcomb.
Whereas "In Cold Blood" focused on the Clutters and the relationship between Smith and Hickock, "Capote" doesn't focus on the crime, so much as what Capote did while researching the book and how what he discovered changed him. This could be fascinating (it was in Clarke's book), but the film's version of Capote is so fundamentally flawed and ugly from the word "go," it's tough to really care how things change for him.
It's not Hoffman's fault: he's playing the role as written and should also be given credit for not going the easy route and turning Capote into a mincing stereotype. We never feel his desperation when things start spinning out of control, mainly because Bennett Miller never ups the emotional ante. He's dealing with powerful, heavy stuff, yet the movie has a calm, leisurely approach to it. There is no sense of horror when we see the aftermath of the massacre at the Clutter house; there is no sense of devastation when we see how far Capote falls in order to get the story. Only Cooper, as the dogged detective investigating the crime, seems aware of the toll these events take on the people around them. I guess this is a deliberate choice on Miller's part because the whole thesis of the film is about how a reporter cannot become emotionally entwined with his work, or he risks losing his integrity. This works if you are a reporter writing an impartial news report, but as a filmmaker, you need passion in order for your work to be relevant.
As a study of Truman Capote's psyche, the movie is no great shakes. There is too much pop psychology floating around the frames for it to ever be taken seriously. However, the movie still worked for me on a more abstract level as a study of how a journalist can lose his way.
As somebody who spends an inordinate amount of time churning out two 1,500-word columns every week, I could identify with Capote's sense of desperation. Look, I'm not trying to complain — I have the coolest part-time job in the world: I get to see movies for free and then get paid to write what I think about them. Easy, right? Well, most of the time it is. But then there are those times when it can be a bitch, like when I have 45 minutes to write 1,500 words explaining why "Just Like Heaven" is sorta-kinda-not-really-worth seeing.
Truman Capote was a guy who loved writing (or at least loved the life he got to lead because he could write) and then had everything he loved taken away from him when he lost himself in the Clutter murders. He didn't remember the golden rule every journalist has to learn before he or she picks up the press pass: the writer is not the story. As a journalist, there is something profoundly sad about seeing a fellow scribbler lose his soul in his work because he just couldn't stay out of the limelight he had grown so accustomed to when he became the East Side golden boy after "Breakfast at Tiffany's."
In this respect, the movie is unexpectedly moving, especially for somebody like me, a writer who revels in the dreaded "I" and has never hesitated about bringing his personal life into his columns. Capote did the same things — and thought he could get away with it. He did, for a while, until something slipped in Holcolb, Kan., and arguably one of the great writers of the 20th century went into a free fall that ended only when he died. The movie is a study of what caused that free-fall. It doesn't entirely account for why it happened, although we get to see fragments, which, if pieced together properly, form an alarming picture of how fast a talented person (or any person) can fall if they lose their sense of self. It's a jungle out there, baby. Just ask Tru; he'll tell you as much.
Grade: BC
