Posted: 09/21/2005

Capote

(2005)

by Parama Chaudhury

I’ve sworn off biopics after I saw Martin Scorcese’s blockbuster, The Aviator, last year. Don’t get me wrong—it wasn’t that bad a film, and Leonardo DiCaprio does an impressive Howard Hughes. But even with a maestro directing, and actors of the caliber of DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett, the central problem that ails all biopics was what ultimately felled the Aviator. That problem is that most people have at most, one interesting chapter in their lives, and so sitting through a couple of hours documenting the rest of their lives can be torture. Call me self-centered, but I’m just not that interested in most people. So under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have ventured anywhere near Capote, a 110 minute long examination of the acclaimed writer and social butterfly. Why did I end up going? Three little words that should be music to a contemporary cinephile’s ears: Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Hoffman plays Truman Capote in all his effete splendor, twirling around in his dress coat, giggling with his childhood friend, Harper Lee, played by the excellent Catherine Keener, and being the belle of the ball at all those New York literary soirees. I saw Hoffman for the first time in Boogie Nights, and I’ve watched each of his subsequent movies with the growing conviction that this is, indeed, the De Niro of our generation. The biopic format lends itself to caricature, and Hoffman’s characterization of Capote does border on exaggeration. But Hoffman is clever enough to throw in a flavor of Capote’s cunning—surely a man this well-connected and successful had to have more than a dash of cunning—to keep things interesting. When Capote reads the newspaper in search of his next story, his eyes are narrowed and his hunter instincts are on alert. In Hoffman’s hands, we get a man who is street smart and perfectly capable of being self-serving and manipulative along with being a charming conversationalist and a brilliant writer.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie does not do justice to Hoffman’s skills. For starters, it is too long. First-time feature director Bennett Miller starts off in the right direction. He focuses on only one small but extremely significant phase in Capote’s life: his writing of In Cold Blood, a book he calls a “nonfiction novel” and that made him a legend. The writer is by now famous enough—Breakfast at Tiffany’s has already charmed everyone around—to decide what he wants his next piece for the New Yorker to be. So we are spared the tedious writer-as-a-poor-but-deserving-minnow stuff, and go straight to a study of how a man at the top of his game, performs his magic. The problem is that 90 minutes is more than sufficient to give us a complete picture of the goings-on. Miller flirts with the idea of looking into Capote’s relationship with his partner Jack Dunphy, spending a good amount of time on their conversations, but doesn’t really say anything interesting enough to make this time well spent. Capote’s interactions with Harper Lee are much more interesting, but Catherine Keener in Lee’s role doesn’t have enough important lines to make her character come alive. The pace of the movie is also uneven. Early on, when Capote and Lee visit Kansas to investigate the murder of the Clutter family, the camera is smooth and calm, taking its time to sweep over the vast expanse of the plains which had suddenly become the center of attention for these gruesome murders. But as the film proceeds and the director tries to add on more and more elements to the story, the camera hurries along, getting a little bit of this and a little bit of that. What started off as a thought-provoking look at a complicated man, investigated through his own research into a killer’s mind, ends up being an uninspiring linear narrative strewn with odds and ends of trivia.

Nevertheless, Capote is worth seeing simply because of the quality of acting. Hoffmann and Keener are both excellent in their roles, while Chris Cooper as the town sheriff puts in a strong supporting performance. The buzz is that this is the film that will finally get Hoffman that Oscar. It’s unfortunate that a brilliant actor like Hoffman was not recognized for his work in a more adventurous film like Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, but what’s important is that the recognition eventually arrives. So if Capote’s only claim to fame is that it brought Phillip Seymour Hoffman into the mainstream spotlight, it will have more to commend it than many other films.

Parama Chaudhury is a film critic and economics professor living in New England.

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