Review

Review Date: 23-October-05
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Jubilation!

Capote (2005)

While watching "Capote" I was nearly asphyxiated by the quarts of 100-proof perfume in which the woman in front of me was pickled. The theater was full, or else I would have moved, and the situation was so dire that for the whole movie I had my shirt pulled over my nose. Yet through the fumes of horror I was able to discern another, equally powerful sensation which began in my brain and advanced through my heart to my gut. It was vaguely familiar, a tingly compound of discovery, admiration, and excitement. It was, in fact, the feeling effected by a truly great film, which I haven't experienced all year.

"Capote" is directed with stunning modulation by Bennett Miller, but its success depends upon a central role and performance of uncompromising complexity. As author Truman Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman is droll, disturbing, lovable, and despicable without ever seeming larger than life. We first make his acquaintance at a cocktail party in November 1959, where he regales a group of New York literati with his celebrated wit. His hunger for recognition is established when he boards a train for Kansas next day, as we see how it's tolerated by good pal Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), who accompanies him on his trip.

What draws this pair of Southern emigrants-turned-sophisticates to the Midwest is a multiple homicide that Capote views as material for a magazine article. His effete manner and odd voice render him suspicious to the locals, but with Lee and fame smoothing the way he soon gains access to the victims' friends and the investigator assigned to the case (Chris Cooper). His curiosity is aroused by the macabre outlandishness of the tale (small town family obliterated in its own home), and when two suspects are arrested his interest becomes a passion to create something entirely new: a full-length, nonfiction novel about the sinister element in America. (Which he did, to resounding acclaim, with In Cold Blood.)

Before Capote meets the murderer Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.) he appears to be an intelligent, self-absorbed person whose vulnerability endears him to people like Lee and his lover Jack (Bruce Greenwood). As he develops a relationship with his incarcerated subject, new layers are added to his identity. At one point he describes his attraction to Smith as a kinship wherein they seemed to have grown up in the same house and left simultaneously, one through the front door and one through the back. Indeed, during all their conversations, which take place over five years between stays of execution, Smith and Capote both try to shield their instincts for cruelty and self-preservation behind the guise of sympathy. Now and then they reveal how childhood abuse molded them into narcissists capable of compassion but driven by stronger needs, as each recognizes in the other. Their association becomes a heartbreaking enigma. Other movies have described death row inmates as human, but "Capote" offers an equally startling depiction of a death row inmate's longtime biographer, occasional champion, and touch-and-go friend. From one scene to the next, Hoffman forces you to look his exceptional but fallible character in the face, and it's a vision of genuine brilliance.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.