Capote

For some reason, I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about seeing Capote. I sort of thought it was my duty to see it, but it was mostly based on seeing Hoffman, who I try not to miss if he’s starring in pictures not directed by Joel Schumacher. This was largely due to a vague sense that Truman Capote was kind of a famous-for-being-famous star of little contemporary interest; I thought of him is a ultimately minor author inflated by being part of New York literary circles, and just didn’t really care about finding out more. About this, I was dead wrong. It’s a fascinating story, and a terrific movie.

Movies about the moral dilemmas of writers can sometimes have what I call a “Cameron Crowe” problem–that is, a tendency to inflate trivial issues to gigantic proportions because they’re close to your own life, best exemplified in having Jerry Maguire revolve around a manifesto…written by an agent…saying that they should have fewer clients…and treat them with soul…or something. (Seriously, who gives a shit?) But Capote transcends these problems. It’s important to emphasize, first of all, that it’s not a biopic; it’s focused entirely on the writing ofIn Cold Blood, and it therefore doesn’t have any of the rise-fall-redemption arc that usually acts as an anchor on even the best films in the genre. It is, rather, a quite merciless examination of the brutal price that the artist exacts to create. Capote is charming, and funny, and gifted. But also manipulative, dishonest, and remarkably self-absorbed, and without the latter characteristics In Cold Blood could never have been written. (To me, perhaps the best of the many astonishing scenes was his cruel dismissal of an earnest fan after a work-in-progress reading.) Even the biggest weakness of the film–the fact that with the exception of a no-nonsense, intelligent, and literate small-town police chief played by Chris Cooper the supporting characters are basically ciphers–can in a perverse way be justified by the fact that to Capote, they were pretty much means rather than ends. This isn’t to say that Capote was evil; he’s to committed to his work to stop his destructive behavior, but he was decent enough to be effectively destroyed by it.

I suppose at this point giving more praise to Phillip Seymour Hoffman is like sending 50 bucks to Warren Buffett, but there’s certainly no better actor working in American film, and he’s exceptional as always. Like many great actors, he has to do a lot of movies that don’t rise to his talents, and while there have been some good minor ones (I’m especially partial to Owning Mahony), this is the first truly first-rate film he’s been in since Lebowski and Boogie Nights. The marvelous Catherine Keener does valiant work with her portrayal of Harper Lee–who also never wrote another book–although the part is badly underwritten, and Cooper is always a gem. But there isn’t a weak performance in the film (I particularly liked Bob Balaban’s William Shawn, although I can no longer see him without thinking “Get a good look, Costanza?”), and it’s a quite remarkable directing debut for Bennett Miller. It’s a powerful, haunting, and very smart movie, and it’s nice to be pleasantly surprised.