CAPOTE (2005) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Bennett Miller
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener,
Clifton Collins Jr., Mark Pellegrino,
Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood, Bob Balaban
Philip Seymour Hoffman channels Truman Capote in a film about the time Capote spent in the late '50s and early '60s writing and researching "In Cold Blood". You get a sense of the movie's tone at the very start. A car pulls up to an isolated Kansas farm house, and a teenaged girl gets out and walks up to the door. She knocks but there's no answer, so she goes inside. She calls out but the house is quiet, so she starts looking around and goes upstairs. When she looks into one of the rooms and sees a body on a bed with its head half blown off and blood splattered on the wall, she lets out a strangled yelp, something between a shriek and a gasp, that catches in her throat. Just when, in any other movie, the girl would scream, she's silent, stunned, paralyzed. A day or two later, Truman Capote arrives to investigate what happened for a magazine article that will evolve into his groundbreaking "non-fiction novel." Decked out in a long, flowing scarf and an ankle-length camel's hair coat, Capote isn't just a fish out of water, he's a being from another planet. And that's before he opens his mouth. Good thing his old pal Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) is there to help run interference with the the good people of Kansas. The challenge in playing somebody as outwardly flamboyant as Capote is to get beyond the caricature, and Hoffman does that, using the famous poses and mannerisms as a starting point and reaching beneath them to reveal a brilliant, dedicated writer who's also a vain, manipulative monster, the self-obsessed center of his own peculiar universe. There's a hint of Brando in some of Hoffman's moves and mumbled inflections, and the performance itself is a tour de force, the case of a great actor in what stands to be the role of his career. It's a mark of Miller's skill behind the camera, and Hoffman's in front of it, that the actor doesn't overwhelm the film, while the film itself would be unimaginable without its lead performance. You can't help wondering, too, what the real Capote would say, if he knew that 20 years after his death, people would be making movies about him. Something bitchy, no doubt.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
(1967-2014)
