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CAPOTE
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Two journeys are chronicled in Capote. Truman Capote travels to Holcomb, Kansas, at first on a journalistic lark and then later repeatedly as a pilgrim drawn to the votive avatar of Perry Smith, the virgin enigmatic in whom Truman sees a refracted version of himself. Accompanying Capote visually on his pilgrimages, we see the inner crisis of his creativity run dry, even as he toils on his masterwork, leaving his fecundity to express itself only in NYC's gay-apple soirees.
Just as Truman adopted a sparely factual approach to In Cold Blood, so does first-time director Bennett Miller use an understated storytelling structure. Truman himself seldom if ever raises his voice, never moves quickly or decisively, primly unbuttons his topcoat or rakishly tosses his gray Bergdorf scarf. His hands flutter like doves, fingers a-twitter, cigarette smoke swirling visual glissades. Young Capote, who arrived in Manhattan as a full-blown image of himself, cultivated the aura of an embittered feral sprite. Here in 1959 he is 35, no longer quite so young, very much the establishment man of letters, yet so insecure he bribes others to offer fulsome compliments in hopes that they are taken as genuine. The love affair of Truman with Truman, a character sardonically comments.
Perhaps he is covering up for lack of inspiration. My writer friend Steve Popkes has commented that many an author (particularly a young one) first bursts out with a spray of fiction written from his or her history, seemingly without limit, until one day that stockpile is exhausted, when the author must discover if he can write beyond his autobiography. Joseph Heller never managed it, nor did Harper Lee. Capote catches Truman after his early-career successes, all of them auto-biographically inspired, as he settles, with what intuitive genius we never know, on the Clutter killing in Holcomb, Kansas.
Just as Truman sprang literarily full-grown, a prodigy at 22, so does Philip Seymour Hoffman (MAGNOLIA) inhabit the role from the first. With an uncannily accurate impression of Capote's speaking style, the breathy shy monolog of the epigrammatist, he simply assumes center stage as if it is his due, arriving in Kansas shepherded around by his adoring New Yorker editorial assistant, practical tender Nell Harper Lee, herself at work on a novel about which Truman shows the faintest flickers of interest. Truman's quietly certain poise seems to subdue everyone around him, muting colors, dampening sounds, stilling gestures until everyone moves as if hushed simply by proximity to him. Lacking a handle for the story, he imposes himself on Holcomb's citizens, waiting for the police to catch the killers so he can interview them. When they do, Truman immediately limpets himself to Perry Smith, dark, shy, small, sensitive, self-educated, in constant pain from old breaks in his misshapen legs, stunned and bewildered by his new circumstances.
Whether out of spiritual kinship, unrequited love, or morbid curiosity, Truman rapidly fixates on Perry Smith, becoming consumed with knowing precisely what happened on November 14, 1959, and how the four Clutters could be so brutally murdered. "Perry and I grew up in the same house," he tells Harper Lee, "but one day he went out the back door and I went out the front." In this he arrogates to himself the capacity for violence -- I am a profoundly dangerous person, he wants her to think -- while dissociating himself from any action. Harper (Catherine Keener, LIVING IN OBLIVION) is an ideal confidante: a warm counterpoise, tolerant of Capote (in awe of him), not the remotest bit threatening in any way including sexual.
Though the movie explains little, it shows much, and captivates us throughout. The title In Cold Blood, which Truman confides to his editor William Shawn (Bob Balaban, 2010) with limply preening self-satisfaction even before he has shown Shawn the first word, gradually comes to resonate on three levels: in the killers' approach to their victims, Truman's to the killers, and the movie's to Truman. Each deeper level is in fact colder than the predecessor, for while Hickock and Smith sought to rob and killed in hot blood, Capote stalked Perry with a reptilian stillness, just as the film stalks Truman with a lidless continuity. He lies with the straightest of faces, his apparently guileless expression in fact concealing depths of duplicity, each false confidence bestowed as if a gift of special friendship even as it is merely bait to coax out a new secret.
After In Cold Blood, Truman settled down to a life of Author As Display Bauble, playing himself in party after soiree, chain-smoking, name-dropping, forth-holding, and steadily drinking, the star of his own studiedly extemporaneous urban tales. As his pen ran dry, his throat stayed wet, and his chill inquisitiveness enabled him to lap up society's petty vices until he bundled them up in the unfinished-but-published Answered Prayers, which at one stroke closed all the social doors his wit had previously opened. Though this is mentioned only in a framing-text epilog, it serves to close the arc of Truman's personality, from prancing verbal faun to doughy stiletto-wielding literary footpad.