This week at the SFC: Capote
Thursday 6 April, 2006
CAPOTE (Bennett Miller/USA/2005/114')
Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in a stunning performance as the complex Truman Capote, hailed by some as the greatest writer of his generation, and by others as an exploitative fraud
In his memoir, A Sort of Life, Graham Greene recalls a period he spent in hospital early in his literary career. A 10-year-old boy died shortly after being brought in and while the other patients put on radio headphones in order not to intrude on the parents' grief, Greene watched and listened. There might be something he could store away for use in a novel. 'There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer,' he observed. Bennett Miller's Capote is about the splinter of ice in the heart of the author of In Cold Blood
This is not a biography of Capote but it creates a subtle portrait of a public figure by concentrating on a crucial moral crisis in his professional life and the ethical responsibilities it involved. It too begins in the 1950s, contrasting two American worlds a thousand miles apart. In November 1959, on the forlorn plains of west Kansas, their flatness stretching across the widescreen, a girl comes to an isolated farmhouse. She discovers its wealthy owner, George Clutter, a stalwart of the local church and the Republican party, has been brutally murdered along with his wife and two teenage children. Meanwhile in New York, the gregarious, openly gay Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is regaling a cocktail party with an outrageous story about a fellow homosexual writer, James Baldwin.
Right from the start, Hoffman's performance is astonishing. He's got to a T (or a Capote) those fluttering gestures, the rolling eyes and the voice simultaneously soft and high-pitched, the sense of egotism and defiant confidence. This is the man of whom Norman Mailer wrote in 1959: 'He is as tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he's a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation.'
The following day Capote sees a small item in the New York Times about the Clutter murders and immediately calls the editor of the New Yorker, suggesting he go out there to write a piece on the case. There was much debate at the time about the future of the novel and the contest between fact and fiction, and he'd been on the lookout for some such subject, having spent several years honing his skills as an interpretative reporter and perfecting his gifts of recall.
He sets off on his search for the real, authentic America, something different from the gothic Deep South of the fiction that made him famous and the brittle world of cafe society he adorns in New York and on the jet-set circuit. He's accompanied by his lifelong friend from Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener, excellent as always), who serves as his research assistant and conscience-keeper. She's herself about to become famous as the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. The journey begins hilariously with Capote bribing a Pullman porter to praise his books in front of Nelle, and continues in a comic vein as the exotic, camp Capote in his Bergdorf scarf and ankle-length camel-hair coat meets the prim local officials in their dark off-the-peg suits and macho styles. But gradually they come to accept his presence, to appreciate his seriousness, and he cleverly ingratiates himself with them as he gathers material for his book. Then the movie takes on a darker tone as the killers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, a pair of psychopathic losers from the wrong side of the tracks, are arrested in Las Vegas and brought back to Kansas.
With his confident wheedling persistence, Capote gets access to the two murderers, and creates an intimate relationship with the vulnerable Perry, who becomes essential to this book about the confrontation between respectable Middle America and its violent dark underbelly. Capote speaks of having discovered a goldmine. When the two men are convicted, the seemingly solicitous author becomes involved in assisting their various appeals that continue over the next five years until they're executed in 1965. But how much of this is motivated by true compassion and how much from a ruthless artist's need to gather the information about Perry and what actually happened that fatal night in 1959? And is an artist justified in going to any lengths in pursuit of a masterpiece?
In writing In Cold Blood and styling it 'a non-fiction novel', Capote completely eliminated himself. The book has no footnotes, photographs or appendices, just a page of acknowledgements and an assurance that nothing has been invented. Very cleverly the film restores the scaffolding, so we can see how it was created and at what cost. The movie ends with a shattered Capote returning from witnessing the execution, and a statement that the book became an immense success, making Capote the country's most celebrated author. It is also pointed out that he never wrote anything of significance in the subsequent 20 years that ended in his death as an alcoholic at the age of 59.
One person who did not join in the general adulation was Kenneth Tynan, a good friend of Capote's. Privately he claimed that Capote had jumped up and down with joy when Hickock and Smith were hanged, saying: 'I'm beside myself with joy.' Publicly, his lengthy review in The Observer charged that Capote exploited the boys and could not have published the book in the form it took had they survived. 'No piece of prose, however deathless, is worth a human life,' he charged. Capote threatened to sue, but settled for equal space to reply, accusing Tynan of having 'the morals of a baboon and the guts of a butterfly'. Their friendship ended abruptly.
CAPOTE (Bennett Miller/USA/2005/114')
Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in a stunning performance as the complex Truman Capote, hailed by some as the greatest writer of his generation, and by others as an exploitative fraud
In his memoir, A Sort of Life, Graham Greene recalls a period he spent in hospital early in his literary career. A 10-year-old boy died shortly after being brought in and while the other patients put on radio headphones in order not to intrude on the parents' grief, Greene watched and listened. There might be something he could store away for use in a novel. 'There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer,' he observed. Bennett Miller's Capote is about the splinter of ice in the heart of the author of In Cold Blood
This is not a biography of Capote but it creates a subtle portrait of a public figure by concentrating on a crucial moral crisis in his professional life and the ethical responsibilities it involved. It too begins in the 1950s, contrasting two American worlds a thousand miles apart. In November 1959, on the forlorn plains of west Kansas, their flatness stretching across the widescreen, a girl comes to an isolated farmhouse. She discovers its wealthy owner, George Clutter, a stalwart of the local church and the Republican party, has been brutally murdered along with his wife and two teenage children. Meanwhile in New York, the gregarious, openly gay Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is regaling a cocktail party with an outrageous story about a fellow homosexual writer, James Baldwin.
Right from the start, Hoffman's performance is astonishing. He's got to a T (or a Capote) those fluttering gestures, the rolling eyes and the voice simultaneously soft and high-pitched, the sense of egotism and defiant confidence. This is the man of whom Norman Mailer wrote in 1959: 'He is as tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he's a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation.'
The following day Capote sees a small item in the New York Times about the Clutter murders and immediately calls the editor of the New Yorker, suggesting he go out there to write a piece on the case. There was much debate at the time about the future of the novel and the contest between fact and fiction, and he'd been on the lookout for some such subject, having spent several years honing his skills as an interpretative reporter and perfecting his gifts of recall.
He sets off on his search for the real, authentic America, something different from the gothic Deep South of the fiction that made him famous and the brittle world of cafe society he adorns in New York and on the jet-set circuit. He's accompanied by his lifelong friend from Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener, excellent as always), who serves as his research assistant and conscience-keeper. She's herself about to become famous as the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. The journey begins hilariously with Capote bribing a Pullman porter to praise his books in front of Nelle, and continues in a comic vein as the exotic, camp Capote in his Bergdorf scarf and ankle-length camel-hair coat meets the prim local officials in their dark off-the-peg suits and macho styles. But gradually they come to accept his presence, to appreciate his seriousness, and he cleverly ingratiates himself with them as he gathers material for his book. Then the movie takes on a darker tone as the killers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, a pair of psychopathic losers from the wrong side of the tracks, are arrested in Las Vegas and brought back to Kansas.
With his confident wheedling persistence, Capote gets access to the two murderers, and creates an intimate relationship with the vulnerable Perry, who becomes essential to this book about the confrontation between respectable Middle America and its violent dark underbelly. Capote speaks of having discovered a goldmine. When the two men are convicted, the seemingly solicitous author becomes involved in assisting their various appeals that continue over the next five years until they're executed in 1965. But how much of this is motivated by true compassion and how much from a ruthless artist's need to gather the information about Perry and what actually happened that fatal night in 1959? And is an artist justified in going to any lengths in pursuit of a masterpiece?
In writing In Cold Blood and styling it 'a non-fiction novel', Capote completely eliminated himself. The book has no footnotes, photographs or appendices, just a page of acknowledgements and an assurance that nothing has been invented. Very cleverly the film restores the scaffolding, so we can see how it was created and at what cost. The movie ends with a shattered Capote returning from witnessing the execution, and a statement that the book became an immense success, making Capote the country's most celebrated author. It is also pointed out that he never wrote anything of significance in the subsequent 20 years that ended in his death as an alcoholic at the age of 59.
One person who did not join in the general adulation was Kenneth Tynan, a good friend of Capote's. Privately he claimed that Capote had jumped up and down with joy when Hickock and Smith were hanged, saying: 'I'm beside myself with joy.' Publicly, his lengthy review in The Observer charged that Capote exploited the boys and could not have published the book in the form it took had they survived. 'No piece of prose, however deathless, is worth a human life,' he charged. Capote threatened to sue, but settled for equal space to reply, accusing Tynan of having 'the morals of a baboon and the guts of a butterfly'. Their friendship ended abruptly.
posted by Jonathan at 11:48 PM
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