| PERSONS UNKNOWN, PERSONS KNOWN : Bennett Miller's 'Capote' [7/10] |
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| Tuesday, 28 March 2006 | |
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If he had known how long In Cold Blood would take—and what it would take out of him—he would never had stopped in Kansas, Truman Capote later wrote. He would instead have driven straight through—"like a bat out of hell." Gerald Clarke, Capote : A Biography I enjoyed working with all of them. They wanted to make a classy movie. And they did. Clarke, from GeraldClarke.com The destructive consequences of the creative process are explored in Capote, a classily compelling but rather ostentatiously dour dramatisation of how Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) came to write his 1966 bestseller In Cold Blood. Previously best known for more lightweight fare such as the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, Capote was entering dangerous, uncharted territory with what he described as a "non-fiction novel" about the 1959 murder of a Kansas family. Having decided - almost on a whim - to make the killings the subject of his next book, he travelled from New York to the mid-west to research the case - accompanied and assisted by his lifelong friend and fellow writer Harper Lee (Catherine Keener). Capote ended up befriending one of the two men arrested for the crime, the articulate and charismatic Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr). Working on the book while Smith and co-defendant Dick Hickok (Mark Pellegrino) went on trial, Capote found himself in an invidious position: his investigations and intercessions on Smith's behalf prolonged the court process, but he needed this process to end in order to finish his work. It was a kind of 'participatory journalism' avant la lettre - although, unlike Bill Plimpton and Hunter S Thompson, Capote resisted the temptation to make himself a character in his own book. The price of Capote's efforts was an intellectual/emotional anguish which, the film suggests, left the writer with permanent, debilitating mental scars - we're informed by a gloomy end title-card that Capote "never finished another book." While it's true that Capote never completed another novel (Answered Prayers, on which he famously laboured for many years, was published posthumously) this conclusion does give a somewhat misleading impression. Despite increasing problems with drink and drugs, Capote did manage to turn out numerous acclaimed collections of short stories, another novella, and a successful screenplay (The Great Gatsby). And he had only published two novels (Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Grass Harp) in the two decades of his writing career leading up to In Cold Blood. Futterman and Miller, however, seem determined to present Capote as a tragic, ruined figure - one who, having poured heart and soul into his 'masterpiece', found himself almost totally emptied out. In Cold Blood is, even four decades on, an impressive page-turner - but to call it a masterpiece, and/or base a whole film on it possessing such a status, is at the very least debatable. A rather uneasy blend of fiction and non-fiction, as a journey into the criminal mind it's rather small beer alongside, say, Patricia Highsmith's novels of similar vintage such as Deep Water (1957) This Sweet Sickness (1960) or The Cry of the Owl (1962). To be fair to Miller and Futterman, such objections only really trouble the viewer after the film is over: this is an absorbingly poised, professionally crafted example of serious, adult-oriented American independent film-making - easy to admire, rather more difficult to warm to or like. There's a bracingly chilly lugubriousness about the enterprise, with effective contributions from cinematographer Adam Kimmel (who makes a wintrily sombre Manitoba convincingly stand in for Kansas); editor Christopher Tellefsen and Atom Egoyan's regular composer Mychael Danna. At the film's core, however, is the phenomenal (and justifiably Oscar-winning) performance from Hoffman, who somehow looks about half the size he did in Anthony Minghella's Highsmith adaptation The Talented Mr Ripley: a hyper-intelligent, sensitive soul, hiding his torments behind a veneer of archly knowing camp, Hoffman's Capote could be distant kin of those Vincent Price protagonist/villains from Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. The supporting cast wisely allow Hoffman plenty of room to do his 'thing' - although Pellegrino does turn in surprisingly energetic and vivid work (from very limited screen time) as Smith's coltishly genial partner-in-crime. Capote illustrated John Updike's famous definition of celebrity as "the mask that eats the face" (not for nothing did he cameo as "runner-up in the Truman Capote lookalike contest" during Annie Hall) and Capote the film shows us a man uncertain of where the mask ends and the face begins - indeed, perhaps unaware of the distinction until his involvement in the Kansas case forces him to look in the mirror. And what, then, does he see? At what point does the mask end and the face begin? Miller and Futterman never really provide answers to these questions. The writer born ' Truman Persons ' (punningly?) called the second section of In Cold Blood "Persons Unknown," which is how the police initially described the culprits in the Kansas case. And despite all Hoffman's sterling efforts, the writer remains something of an enigma: unknowable, untouchable, helplessly trapped within the persona which was always his most brilliant, fascinating and enduring creation. Neil Young 28th March, 2006 CAPOTE : [7/10] : USA (USA/Can) 2005 : Bennett MILLER : 114 mins (BBFC timing) seen at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 12th March 2006 - public show
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