Capote [DVD] [2005]

The film begins in the late '50s when Capote, fresh off the success of Breakfast at Tiffany's. He's now become part of the intellectual and artistic elite, a doyen of the salons and private parties of the Upper East Side and secure in his world and reputation as the New Yorker's best and brightest author.

One afternoon he reads a short newspaper article in The New York Times about the slaying of a rural Kansas family, the Clutters. Something about the gravity of the murders captivates him, and Capote decides the topic is perfect for The New Yorker magazine, an article in which he will show the effect of such a brutal murder on the inhabitants of a small town.

Within days he heads to the community of Holcomb, Kansas in the company of his boyhood chum, Harper Lee, (a fabulous Catherine Keener), soon to write her one and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee serves as his enabler, helping Capote ingratiate himself into the close-knit, and somewhat intolerant, community, as he attempts to make contact with the town's law enforcement professionals and, ultimately, the perpetrators of the deed.

As the narrow minded law enforcement officials, led by Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) reluctantly give Capote information about the crime, the young reporter befriends one of the imprisoned convicts, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) in order to extract as much of his personal perspective about the killings as possible.

But it's a relationship forged in dishonesty - it's the story and not the lives of the murderers that really compel the author - and whilst there's obviously an attraction there - they're both eccentric outsiders from the wrong side of the tracks - Capote is shown as ultimately more concerned about getting the story, as he does his best to postpone Perry's execution until he can get all the information that he needs. He must find out exactly what happened on that night in 1959, and he does such a good job of manipulating Perry's trust so that Perry believes he has a friend who will fight for his life.

Director Bennett Miller, writer Dan Futterman, and most of all actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman capture this process with exquisite accuracy and with the smallest of flourishes. The genius of the film, besides Hoffman's stunning performance, is that it knows exactly how much is enough. It never overplays, lingers or punches up.

The dialogue is intelligent; each scene is carefully laid out, with a gorgeously minimalist piano score that heightens the emotional tension between the characters. Meanwhile, the gray ominous sky and the flat, severe landscape of Kansas, the horizon a hundred miles out, lends its own atmosphere to the proceedings.

Did Capote eventually fall in love with Perry? Perhaps, but you leave the film with a definite sense that Capote's feelings towards the condemned man were enigmatic at best, he was a man torn between finding the story and his very real concern for the fate of another human being. Capote is presented here, flaws and all, as someone rather despicable, but he was also quite sensitive. The anguish he suffers at the results of his decisions emerges as our only glimpse of his potential redemption.

Capote is a stunning film, and a superb drama, as it mines one of man's darkest moral dilemmas - that of gaining and using another's trust for mostly selfish motivations. Much of the complication comes not only from the acknowledgement of guilt by the perpetrator, but also by the genuine feelings of concern and empathy that Capote develops for Perry, and he discovers that can't easily reconcile these feelings with his cold and calculated objective.

The supporting players are exceptional, particularly Keener as Harper Lee and also Bruce Greenwood as author, Jack Dunphy, who was also Capote's partner and lover. But, without diminishing the contributions of all Capote's participants, this is really Hoffman's film. He's an absolute delight. Truman Capote was a complicated, competitive and totally driven man, a literary genius who had many demons, and Hoffman conveys all sides of him to perfection, letting you see the man behind the glasses, the effeminate voice, and the pouting often arrogant humor. Mike Leonard October 05.