Capote Review

Is it possible for a film to be gratuitously non-violent? Or more precisely, lacking the requisite violence? This for me was a real undermining flaw in Capote, where the film's inciting incident, the savage and senseless murder of a family in their home in Kansas is treated with far too much restraint. It was precisely because the case was so shocking and indeed sensational that it attracted the morbid attentions of effete New York sophisticate Truman Capote as the subject for his seminal non-fiction novel In Cold Blood. In the film's treatment, his attraction to sensitive perpetrator Perry Smith is the basis of his desire to humanise the two men responsible. Am I missing the point then? No, because it seems to me that we have no sense of revulsion when we see the two killers in the early part of the film. Even when they are shown laughing and smiling at a photo shoot organised by Capote in the presence of the local lawman who was a friend of the murdered family, the effect is more awkwardness than the visceral sense of disgust which seems more appropriate. My point is that these two men are victims even from the outset so there is nothing to humanise.

Of course the film is not about the killers or the family. Like Capote's work, it is about him, and Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal captures his vanity and self-absorption very well. When Smith's tragic background strikes a chord with his own, it is not sympathy that comes across but rather a mirror for self pity - as a writer, any pain of others is really his own and he will shape and express it as he chooses. Consequently, his determination for the condemned men to stay alive and friendship towards them while he garners material for his book turns to frustration and resentment when they receive stays of execution that deny his book the final chapter. When, having reluctantly attended their hanging, he whines on the phone to Harper Lee that he will never get over it, she makes the point that he at least still alive.

Another trick has been missed in not calling the film 'In Cold Blood' as his book's title is of course the central irony to the film - Capote himself is the one who acts 'in cold blood', a point made explicit if anyone missed it by Chris Cooper's policeman. I've also always felt it a bit lame to simply name a biopic after its subject, relying on whatever connotations that name evokes, eg Nixon. (nb. have since learned that there was movie based on the book in the sixties).

It's unfair to say the film produces insufficent emotional response. What it provokes above all is a strong desire to punch Truman Capote's self-serving, self-obsessed, lying, arrogant, effeminate, whining face. His vanity is contrasted nicely with the genuine modesty of Harper Lee, whose book is better than his in any case in my not at all humble opinion. But since you can't punch him, you might as well do what my friend did and fall asleep.