Welcome to awards season. As a card carrying member of the Chicago Film Critics Association I'm required to see an awful lot of films in the next while. Frankly it's a blessing and a curse to find my little old mailbox stuffed with more screening invites than I can possibly attend. On the one hand I get a pretty good overview of the year in film even if the Academy Awards themselves seem pretty empty/political. I'm far more satisfied with my Chi-Town brethren's assessment and proud to be a part of it this year.
Capote seems a shoe-in for a Best Actor nom but an adapted screenplay nom may be in order as well. Adapted from Gerald Clarke's wide ranging biography this remarkable film showcases the dire danger of staring into the abyss with our creative eye.
CAPOTE
Sony Classics
Directed by Bennett Miller
Capote offers a small miracle for those who are willing to look beyond its commonplace biopic charms. Part portrait, part examination of the relationship between writer and subject, Capote offers what is probably the greatest performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s career but it’s also an incredibly insightful look at a key event in the life of one of the last century’s most gifted writers; an event that, coupled with his own demons, left him unable to write anything else of note and helped deprive the world of his unique voice.
On its face the project must have sounded simple to Truman Capote. He was already a critical and commercial success, having written, among other things the novel and the screenplay of Breakfast At Tiffany’s. When he first encountered a newspaper article describing the brutal killing of the Clutter family in a small Kansas town he decided to do the piece as a look at the way the murders, investigation and trial had affected the town’s people. Traveling to Holcomb with his good friend and future author of To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee, he set about the process of research. As Hoffman has said in interviews "[Capote] said later if he'd known what was going to happen, he would have driven right through the town like a bat out of hell."
Beginning as an article for the New Yorker and spanning the course of increasingly difficult years for it’s author, In Cold Blood went on to become one of the most acclaimed books of the century but at a cost it’s author never could have dreamed. Capote never finished another major work and died an alcoholic (and possible suicide) in part because of the experience of writing a book that in the end divided him evenly as human being and an artist. The historicity of this is taken for granted by the film but seems fair given capote’s own observations and lifelong struggles with the above.
With his high-pitched voice, diminutive stature and obvious homosexuality, Capote was hardly a likely candidate to descend on a remote Kansas farming community and perform the research necessary for In Cold Blood. Yet Capote had a way of ingratiating himself to a wide circle of colleagues and acquaintances. Hoffman captures perfectly a sense of sincere human concern without losing sight of the insecurity that prevented Capote from being able to maintain close human relationships. The performance is both an homage and a critique and Capote emerges as not only all the more human but vitally so- sadly sweet, capturing the individual taste of a man that is only hinted at in his interviews and talk show appearances, but that make his writing as impossible to resist as slow flowing molasses.
To read Capote’s In Cold Blood is to emerge not with a simple point of view about capital punishment, small town America or the American dream, but with a sense of how big the subject of the book was. In Cold Blood is timeless precisely because it is so insightful about the connection between all men and the mystery of the evil that men do. Upon meeting Perry Smith Capote reminisced that it was as if they had grown up in the same house and gone out the front and back doors only to meet again after destiny had already settled their respective paths. Not only did Capote understand that he was ultimately an unwilling participant in Smith’s story but that his own shadow, the shadow of all men and women who deign to pass judgment on other human beings, was around every corner of Holcomb Kansas between every line of In Cold Blood. The book cries out with a love for humanity but it’s a love tempered with the fear of what humanity is, what it tends toward. In Capote’s final analysis all men are simply human, the evil that they do emerges as more than that. The person that does the evil, judges the evil, is victimized by the evil is no more or less than what we all are. It is the futility of our judgment that sets us at such bitter odds. We can incarcerate, kill, even torture those who do evil but we can’t really judge well enough even as we can’t really love well enough.
And the above is a perfect lead-in to describe Hoffman’s masterful portrayal. In short it’s impossible to separate Capote the man from his work and Hoffman gets to the bottom of why not by imitating the voice, mincing gestures and aura of bitchiness that comedians all over the world (and Capote himself) made famous but by channeling the person underneath who wanted to be liked, loved accepted and praised but who judged himself so harshly. Like Charlize Theron in Monster, or Paul Giamatti in American Splendor we waste no time with suspension of disbelief and instead are hurtled full force into the natural beauty of Capote warts and all.
Intent on not simply fawning over yet another great performance from Phillip Baker Hall I took a page from an old friend of mine-literally. He suggested I read Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer prior to writing my review. We don’t recommend a lot of books here at ScreenAnarchy for obvious reasons but in this case there’s every reason for you to visit your local library. The Journalist and the Murderer examines the relationship of writer and subject- a relationship that in Malcom’s view is problematic at best and potentially devastating. Her case in point is the famous lawsuit, which pitted writer Joe McGinniss against the subject of his book Fatal Vision, Jeffrey MacDonald, who was accused of brutally murdering his pregnant wife and child.
In the original military tribunal MacDonald was acquitted. But tried again years later in a criminal court he was convicted. Given almost unprecedented access to the defense team and the defendant McGinniss quickly decided that MacDonald was guilty yet kept that opinion to himself choosing instead to forge an even tighter and many believe disingenuous relationship with MacDonald. Assuring the accused that he believed his odd story about murderous hippies McGinniss, wrote his book Fatal Vision, which when published, offered a devastating if dubiously readable psychological portrait of MacDonald as the ultimate sociopathic narcissist. Sued by MacDonald, McGinniss’ unwillingness to settle the case and his inability to explain his actions as a journalist resulted in a guilty verdict that left him owing a substantial sum to the convicted killer. It was a case that understandably electrified writers around the country.
The most fascinating aspect of the book is the inability of McGinniss and his own defense team to explain how and when a writer must “come clean” to the subject about the intent of their research or the difference between research and exploitation. Other famous journalists were brought in by the defense to explain their own take on such matters and one is left with nothing less than a sense of deep unease. The murkiness of such ethical waters truly threaten to drown everyone, least of all readers who depend on writers to not only get the facts but to divulge them in a manner that reflects balance, fairness and where needed, humility. If McGinniss was guilty of anything it seems clear that his biggest sin was not in failing to reveal the full extent of his private opinions to MacDonald but in lifting claiming that it was all done for the sake of the story when McGinniss had substantial money troubles and a great deal of his professional credibility on the line- i.e.: he couldn’t back down or resist the temptation to take advantage of the situation. In short the ends didn’t justify the means because there was no real way to pick apart McGinniss’ motives.
Capote clearly found himself in a similar predicament. Besides his profoundly personal identification with Perry Smith, he realized he couldn’t finish the book until the two men had been executed. And yet if the two men were executed prior to giving him a personal account of what happened that awful night when the Clutter’s were slain the book would also be incomplete. Caught between his own feelings about capitol punishment, his desperate emotional need to put the four-year project behind him and his own doubt about his intentions Capote became withdrawn and self-loathing
In the end I found Capote somewhat slowly paced, it is not a truly great film in the sense that such a term is commonly applied. But it’s observations about human nature are posed in an undeniably compelling, and powerful manner that celebrates and mourns one of the great writers of our time even as it asks what we should be willing to see sacrificed for great art. What was it exactly that drove Capote’s demons? If not In Cold Blood then what or who was missing from his life. Capote the film leaves me with one indelible image, that of a wheat field blown by a cold morning wind on a Kansas plain. For all of his New York celebrity Capote the man seemed to be reaching out, upwards and finally to collapse like an individual stalk in waving sea of grain under cold and stormy iron skies.