". . . answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered." -- Teresa de Avila; the epigraph for Truman Capote's unfinished roman a clef, Answered Prayers.

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I come from the Midwest (at least, so think Pennsylvanians, certainly New Yorkers, when they look west toward Ohio), but in the 1950's my home country did not have those big skied, sweeping, clean vistas that one imagined in Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas -- the True Midwest. No writer ever described that mythic landscape better than Truman Capote did, at the start of his "non-fiction novel," In Cold Blood:

"The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive: horses, herds of cattle, a cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them."

Up to an austere farm house, a fortress on the Kansas plain, near the little town of Holcomb, comes a young woman. It is Sunday, and she has promised to stop by the Clutter farm to take her friend, Nancy, to church. It is also 1959, on the verge of a terrible decade of assassinations and war which would change America for all time, and in this innocent spot, people do not lock their doors. Laura Kinney (Allie Mickelson) enters the seeming holy silence of the home. Thinking the family still asleep, she starts to climb the stair, calling gently for Nancy.

A few minutes later, we all know why the good citizens of Holcomb will stay up all that night with their lights burning, and it is said, never leave their doors unlocked again.

Thus, begins Director Bennett Miller's biopic, CAPOTE, just as the book began, just as Richard Brooks' superb, underrated 1967 movie, IN COLD BLOOD began. The beginning works extremely well in all three of these applications.

The scene then shifts from the muted horizontal morning light of Kansas to the dark vertical towers of New York City, blazingly lit in the night.

In one of the towers, a crowded fashionable party of the Intelligentsia is roaring with sophistication and cocktails. In one corner, a group surrounds a small blond man. Waving a gin and tonic, Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is telling an outrageously vulgar anecdote to amused admirers about his literary rival, Jimmy Baldwin, who has just published Up in Giovanni's Room. Capote is 35, at the height of his powers, and he has just published, Breakfast at Tiffany's, his first novel to be both a literary and a critical success. The adulation of the crowd is obviously like a drug to him.

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Truman Streckfus Persons (later known as Truman Capote) was born in New Orleans (September 30, 1924) to Lillie Mae Faulk Persons, a beautiful Alabama country girl, and Arch Persons, a Latin Quarter con man, a ne'er-do-well. Neglected, Lillie Mae began to see other men, and after a divorce in 1930, little Truman was fobbed off on his cousins in Monroeville, Alabama. One of the spinster Faulk sisters, nicknamed Sook, became perhaps the first genuine human relationship he ever had, and because she acted as a substitute for his mother, she figures in his early novels: Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Grass Harp. But he also made friends with the girl next door, Nelle Harper Lee, who would become a famous novelist in her own right.

When Lillie Mae married Joe Capote, a Cuban textile broker on Wall Street, she brought her son to New York in 1931, where he became Truman Capote and attended a series of excellent schools, both public and private. Lonely, introspective, with a slightly spastic manner and wispy voice, never taller than 5'4" in height, Capote disconcerted people by his frankness, egotism and rather open homosexuality. But women were drawn to him as they might have been to a puppy or a baby. After finishing high school, he got a job as copy boy at the New Yorker, sold his first short story, and he was on his way.

Yet after publishing two well-received novels by the age of 25, in 1951, nearly a decade would pass before he produced the brittle, crowd pleasing Breakfast at Tiffany's. Capote was sinking into the easy New York City lush life, far from the country childhood which had nurtured his talent. No doubt, he was disturbed by his mother's deepening alcoholism and, then, her suicide in 1954, which brought him back from a European sojourn with his partner, successful writer and journalist Jack Dunphy. Under the surface of his wicked wit, what the New Yorker's Brendan Gill called "the gorgeous apparition" was worried.

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One morning in 1959, Truman chances upon a report on the back pages of the New York Times concerning the apparently motiveless murders of the Clutter farm family -- father, mother, daughter, son -- in what he considers the innocent town of Holcomb, Kansas, a Midwestern replica, perhaps, of Monroeville, Alabama. He persuades the editor of the New Yorker William Shawn (Bob Balaban) to send him way out west on assignment. He hires his boyhood friend, Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), to come from Alabama to be his research assistant.

Arriving in a fashionable camel hair topcoat, scarf twining his throat as if he were a dwarfish air ace, Truman looks very out of place in Holcomb, and puts Kansas Bureau of Investigation Agent Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) off immediately, but thanks to the down-home qualities of Harper, he manages to wiggle his way to the center of the investigation. Harper makes friends with the shy 17 year-old Laura Kinney, who found the shot-gunned bodies, and he persuades Laura to give up diaries chronicling her friendship with Nancy Clutter, winning her over by helping her see that they are both, in a sense, outsiders. He slips into the funeral parlor, where the Clutters lie in closed caskets (back then, suggestive of the most terrible mutilations or illness). He inappropriately raises the coffin lids to note that the victims' faces are shrouded in white muslin.

The biggest coup of all, however, emerges when Harper discovers that KBI Agent Dewey, who lives in Holcomb and knew the Clutters well, has a New Orleans-born wife, Marie (Amy Ryan), who is a movie buff. They approach Marie, who knows all about them. Truman works his charm, and the two researchers are soon having home-cooked dinners with the Dewey's, as Truman regales everyone with his experiences writing John Huston's TO BEAT THE DEVIL (1954). Truman tells them that Huston and Bogart went out at night and "drank like Spanish Water Buffaloes"!

Truman and Harper resolve to take no notes but to write down from memory what they hear and observe. (Truman claims to have total recall of 94%, which he has himself tested.) New Yorker Editor Shawn approves of their plan and begins to publicize the exploits of his tiny star writer. The pair figure that the case can't last more than a few weeks, a couple of months at most, and while they wait, they will work on their other respective projects. Truman doesn't seem to get much done but call his impatient lover, Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood), to gossip about the characters and mores of Holcomb. "People here won't talk to me," Truman complains. "They want someone like Nelle, like you." Harper, however, in particular, is slaving on the manuscript of her first novel, To Kill a Mocking Bird, which she publishes six months later, and which wins a Pulitzer Prize. It will become one of the most successful books of the late 20th Century.

Indeed though, before Christmas of 1959, having dinner with the Dewey's, Amy blurts out that the killers have been identified (by a trail of bad cheques), and shortly, the Las Vegas Chief of Police phones Alvin Dewey to tell him that the alleged killers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, have been picked up on the Strip (driving a stolen car).

In the company of Marie, almost as close to the investigation now as a pair of detectives, Truman and Harper witness the arraignment of Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and Hickock (Mark Pellegrino). The killers will become known to tens of millions of Americans through spreads in Life Magazine with Capote, and eventually, after their deaths, with the publication of In Cold Blood.

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Richard Eugene "Dick" Hickock, the apparent leader of the team, grew up a popular student and athlete in suburban Kansas City, but a serious car wreck in 1950 left him disfigured, and may have affected his mind. As Capote wrote: his head appeared "halved like an apple and then put together a fraction off center." He married a couple of times, had several children, and when he lost mechanic jobs, lapsed into bad cheque writing. He met Perry Smith in the Kansas State Penitentiary, told him a wild story, one day, about a family named the Clutters, who kept a small fortune in a strong box on their farm.

The more interesting of the two to Capote, Perry Edward Smith had been born in Elko, Nevada. His Irish pappy and Cherokee mom rode in rodeos as the team of "Tex and Flo." When they left the rodeo circuit, Tex began to abuse Flo, and she began to drink and take up with men. After she drank herself to death in San Francisco, Perry, along with his brothers and sisters, were put in orphanages. As soon as he was sixteen, Smith joined the Service -- first the Merchant Marine and then, the Army, during the Korean War. Afterward he rejoined his father, hunting and prospecting in Alaska. He applied himself to make up for his third grade education by learning to sketch, play the guitar and master vocabulary. A motorcycle accident crippled one of his legs, and not long following, he went to penitentiary for burglarizing a home in Philipsburg, Kansas. There he met Dick Hickock, whom he sought out on his release . . . the weekend they murdered the Clutters.

The pair must have figured at some juncture that they were natural partners.

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Truman wants to delve into what makes Perry and Dick function, what motivated them. He cons Sheriff Sanderson's wife (Araby Lockhart) into allowing him to observe the depressed Perry at close range, in the holding cell which is attached to the Sheriff's apartment. Here, Capote has a fateful realization. He sees that he and the killers are two sides of a criminal experience. He especially begins to identify with Perry.

A seemingly crazy idea begins to form in his mind. He will write a "non-fiction novel" about the pair and their crime. Though the novel since its inception with Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe had used thinly disguised factual material, Truman fancies he is inventing a new kind of writing. He convinces William Shawn in New York that the story is too big for a mere article; it deserves a book. He will get to know the alleged killers, follow them through the legal process, stay with them to the end of the road, whatever that may be. Shawn is caught up in Truman's vision and sends world-famous photographer Richard Avedon (Adam Kimmel -- the Cinematographer of CAPOTE) out to Kansas to make studies of Perry and Dick. The layouts follow in Life Magazine (almost the biggest magazine in the America of the early 1960's), with a picture on the cover of Perry, Dick, and Truman standing together.

In formulating a thesis, he later tells a journalist in New York: "Two worlds exist in this country; the quiet conservative life and the lives of these two men -- the underbelly, the criminally violent. Those two worlds converged that bloody night."

Capote had happened on what would develop into perhaps the most worrisome domestic dilemma of America in the fin d'siecle.

Becoming possessed with the case, after Smith and Hickock are convicted in a perfunctory trial, Truman brings Dick girly magazines but Perry the works of Thoreau; and on the promise of procuring them first rate lawyers for their appeals, he cajoles Perry to put him on their visitors' list.

Truman gradually comes to see that he and Perry are rather alike. Both are small and shy, both had abusive fathers, both had alcoholic mothers who slept around, both have an interest in art and poetry. Both have a talent for manipulation in getting what they want. He tells Jack Dunphy: "It's as if Perry and I started life in the same house. One day he stood up and walked out the back door while I walked out the front."

Truman bribes Warden Marshall Krutch (Marshall Bell) of the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing to allow him visits with the killers, eventually to have unlimited access. He finesses Perry's notebooks from him. He flies to the West Coast to interview Perry's surviving sister, Linda (Bess Meyer). He even manages to use the investigation notes of Alvin Dewey, who will become the titular hero of IN COLD BLOOD. But he cannot draw from Perry his account of what happened that November night in 1959. At the very least, he needs that to finish his book.

Months pass. Harper Lee goes back to Alabama, completes To Kill a Mocking Bird (containing a character named Dill, based on Capote), sees it published and wins the Pulitzer Prize.

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Years pass, and in 1962, Truman allows Shawn to set up a New York public reading from his manuscript of In Cold Blood. Unfortunately, though he has told the killers in Death Row that he has not yet written a word of the book (which they would like to see finished, to use as evidence in an insanity defense), a newspaper item informs them about the success of the reading. Worse yet, the manuscript is said to be entitled, In Cold Blood.

That title comes to take on a double meaning, both for the killers and for Capote.

More years pass, and in 1964, the case has languished, mired down in appeals which Truman has paid for. Perry pleads with him for more money to finance one last appeal, this time to the Supreme Court. Truman refuses. About that time, Capote is invited by Harper Lee (Nelle as he always calls her) to the World Premier of TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD, what will become known as a classic motion picture, starring Gregory Peck. Drinking more heavily now, he tells his increasingly dubious friend Harper: "If they win this appeal, I'm going to have a complete nervous breakdown. I just pray that it turns my way."

Truman looks upon all the triumphant hype around TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD, and mutters: "I don't see what all the fuss is about."

Not long after that, Harper, his lifelong friend, breaks with him, and by this date, his relationship with Jack Dunphy is impaired. He now wants the whole thing to end, but he is still haunted by his link to Perry.

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The "affair" seemed to come to an end when Truman drew Perry's story of the murders from him, which would allow him to finish his book; certainly when Smith and Hickock were hanged by the neck on April 15, 1965.

But did it?

This ironic question raises CAPOTE to the heights of true tragedy.

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Truman Capote finished his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Though the second half of the book suffered from underwriting and ennui, it was hailed and is still admired. And though it was not necessarily new in form, the book was credited with ushering in "The New Journalism." Norman Mailer, who called Capote the finest stylist of his generation, did him the compliment of imitation when he wrote his own "non-fiction novel," The Executioner's Song. Capote became a fixture on Johnny Carson, a real darling of New York Society, and the new International Jet Set. He registered as a household name in the 1960's and 1970's.

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Strangely enough, if you will remember those white shrouded faces in Holcomb, Kansas, Capote's moment of supreme triumph came when he held a famous Black and White Ball in celebration of In Cold Blood's Success, on November 28, 1966, to which everyone who was anyone, 500 in all -- including Montgomery Clift, John Steinbeck, and High Society -- were invited. Truman required the men to wear black tie, with black masks; the women, black or white dresses, with white masks, plus a fan. The party went on to morning, and Capote was never so high again.

Perhaps the insistence on, and attention to, masks was only coincidental.

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Capote was brilliant, sensitive, renowned, but he had a classic tragic flaw.

For whatever the reason, after spending six years on In Cold Blood, he never completed another book. Trying to turn the trick twice in his unfinished Answered Prayers, he lost all his high society friends, and drank himself to death at age 59. [Nor did Harper Lee finish another book though she is still alive, said to be working on her memoirs.] Gerald Clarke, working from diaries Capote gave him, took 13 years to complete his biography, Capote, on which this film is based. And Dan Futterman, an actor turned screen writer, based his script for CAPOTE on years of research and the same diaries, which Clarke lent him.

CAPOTE, then, is an understated tragedy based on the details of how a famous American writer became enthralled with what he thought would occupy him only a few weeks. Powerful on its own terms, the power is not diminished because its story centers on a prosaic investigation of a multiple murder. The story is both a character study of a famous American writer and a detective story carried on by amateurs to the heights of tabloid sensationalism and serious literature. Indeed, without an ounce of sentimentality, CAPOTE becomes all the more powerful because the more we know or learn about the facts surrounding the murders and the writer's motivations, the more tragic the film becomes.


But, for all the procrastination involved, and psychologizing applied to himself, Truman Capote would be proud of CAPOTE. It is a great motion picture.

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In fact:

CAPOTE is he Best American Theatrical Film I've seen this year. [DER UNTERGANG may be the absolute best.]

CAPOTE has a fair chance of being nominated Best Film of 2005 by the Academy. If not, in retrospect, its reputation can only grow.

CAPOTE may be the Best Film about a writer and the writing process ever made.

The ensemble cast of CAPOTE, though they are seldom all together, is among the best of this year, or any year.

The superb performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman (THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, 1999) as Writer Truman Capote will gain him a Best Actor Oscar Nomination, if not the prize itself. He IS Truman Capote, as Jamie Foxx was Ray Charles in last year's RAY (Taylor Hackford).

CAPOTE is a quiet masterpiece, shot in 36 days for $7, 000,000, by Bennett Miller, a documentarian (THE CRUISE, 1996) making his first theatrical feature film; from a screenplay by Actor Dan Futterman (CHASING AMY), who had never written a successful screenplay before. It is hard to recall another recent dramatic picture, a biopic, a first theatrical film, made with such simplicity, skill and originality. Futterman should be up for Best Adapted Screenplay, too.

CAPOTE functions for long stretches in the silence required for first rate creative writing. It is also the cold silence of the fields of Kansas, of which even the wind seems a part, and the seeming warm silence of rooms of Midwestern homes in the 1950's. Only occasionally does the minimalist score of Mychael Danna (BEING JULIA) provide an accent to the silence, or a necessary touch of New York.

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Let me add this . . . I would be remiss if I did not mention that, as seems to be the vogue now in biopics (i.e, Stone's ALEXANDER, and soon, Baz Luhrmann's version), another picture on the same subject, encompassing Truman Capote's entire life, including his last years, but centered on IN COLD BLOOD, is due out in 2006, with another blockbuster cast:

HAVE YOU HEARD? Written and Directed by Douglas McGrath (NICHOLAS NICKLEBY) from a book by George Plimpton, with Toby Jones as Truman Capote; Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee; Daniel Craig as Perry Smith; Jeff Daniels as Alvin Dewey; Gwyneth Paltrow as legendary songstress Peggy Lee; Sigourney Weaver as Babe Paley (wife of CBS Founder Bill Paley); Isabella Rossellini as Gloria Guinnes (Born Gloria Rubio y Alatorre, who married, among others, the scion of the British beer fortune); and Hope Davis as Slim Keith (former wife of Director Howard Hawks and Producer Leland Hayward).

Truman Capote had the latter mentioned women help him on his various projects, as he had utilized Harper Lee (and as he had used Perry Smith, in a more cold blooded way), but when they discovered he was trying to mix them barely disguised with fictional and other real life characters in Answered Prayers, they turned on him. They were the reason he became a social pariah in New York Society, and why understandably, one might speculate, he never finished his book.

But HAVE YOU HEARD? will have to be very good to top CAPOTE.

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For a review of my nomination of Best Theatrical Film of 2005 so far: (DER UNTERGANG; Downfall) --

http://www.epinions.com/content_170494955140



Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older