One of many reasons Thanksgiving break was great this year

I’m not really a big fan of biopics. Partly this is the result of my previously expressed affection for the power of fiction to be more true than reality. Partly it’s because I think even the most interesting lives lack any kind of engaging narrative arc. So, even though they look to be good and worthwhile films and even though I’m not uninterested in their subjects, I have never seen Ray, or Ali, or Gandhi, etc etc. I rented The Aviator which was interesting to watch (mostly thanks to Cate Blanchett) but excruciatingly boring as a movie. And I want to see Walk the Line because I’m a Johnny Cash fan but I don’t ultimately expect it to be one of my favorite movies.

But despite all that I want to plug a biopic that I saw over Thanksgiving, because I’ve seen a lot of movies this fall and most were high quality but so far this was the best: Capote.

It’s different than a typical biopic, which is part of why it worked so well for me. It’s based on a full length biography of Truman Capote, but the film focuses exclusively on the three or so years he was working on his masterpiece, the “non fiction novel” In Cold Blood.

Disclaimer: I’m a sucker for this story. Like The Insider or Good Night, and Good Luck (both of which are amazing movies in my book) I feel a little uncertain in recommending Capote because part of why I like it so much is because I’m personally so interested in it, and I’m not certain that everyone else would be so naturally fascinated. (In the case of Capote, my fascination is based on writing in general and In Cold Blood in particular, in the other two movies it’s my interest in journalism.)

I read In Cold Blood in high school and until seeing the movie remembered little of it specifically. What I did remember was the reaction it provoked in me: I mean, the book just floored me. Stunned me. It’s such a masterpiece. I had only a short time earlier read the famous account of the Manson crimes Helter Skelter and while that’s a fine book, reading it was like reading a lengthy piece of journalism. It didn’t engage me emotionally. This is part of why In Cold Blood is so spectacular – it really is like a novel, and is written by a writer who at his best is as good as any American writer of the last century. But the story itself is also just shocking. Even in the late 90s I found myself just stunned by the brutality and the senselessness of the crime. I remember thinking: If this book feels like a punch in the gut to me now, what must it have been like to read it in the comparatively innocent 1960s?

Although it doesn’t tell the full story of his life, Capote really is a biopic. In showing us a mere three years of his life, it somehow manages to tell the full story of his life. We see Capote in New York, famous, worldly, flaming. We hear bits and pieces of his background. And we see the pain and the start of the depression and alcoholism that would ultimately cut his life short. Writing In Cold Blood essentially killed Truman Capote. Even though he lived another 20 or so years he never published another book. He was never the same person.

The movie makes it clear why. Primarily, the movie likes to focus on his very complicated relationship with one of the killers, who is awesomely portrayed by the guy who was the drug dealer in Rules of Attraction. He felt an affinity for the man, who had a haunting background that reminded Truman of his own. But he was also terrified of the killer, with good reason. And he needed him, too, and used him in a very deliberate and conscious fashion to get the information he needed for his book.

Now I’m re-reading the book and it’s interesting to see that he must have had a similar (if surely less painful) conflicted relationship with Kansas, the setting for the book, the scene of the crime. Capote was a flamingly gay, completely urban snob. If we’re to believe the movie (and it makes sense) he laughed with almost a sneer at small town Kansas and its conservative values. And yet, the book seems to celebrate those values as sincerely as if Truman had been born and raised and lived there all his life. It’s an effective narrative device (the narrator of In Cold Blood doesn’t seem to really be Truman Capote any more than it would be in one of his fiction stories). But it’s also scary, because after getting very close to this small town and the people in it, he exploited them. Some of his depictions and descriptions of the people in the book are downright cruel. Others are caring. That’s the way it should be with characters – except these were real people who, inevitably, had to read what this man had written about them.

Anyway, Philip Seymour Hoffman just inhabits Capote. They always say that about actors portraying real people, don’t they? But he does. Like I said, I don’t see a lot of biopics, but let me give you the example of one I did see recently. In The Aviator, Leonardo DiCaprio played Howard Hughes. But I always saw DiCaprio on screen. Blanchett played Katharine Hepburn and she was Katharine Hepburn. She inhabited her. I watched the movie and saw Hepburn there. Hoffman does that with Capote. He’s not like himself at all. It’s not just his voice, or his mannerisms. It’s everything. I know he played a gay character in Boogie Nights, too, but you could hardly believe he’s the same actor. Bravo to him. (I though Catherine Keener as Harper Lee was also great and I’ve never seen Chris Cooper in anything I didn’t think he was great in.)

Diana said she thought it dragged in parts and she’s probably right (she did seem to really like it despite that note). I can’t insist you go see it. It’s a quiet and deliberate movie. There are scenes (one in particular comes to mind) that really do drag on, but they left me utterly transfixed. But if you’re not engaged they will seem overlong and boring. There aren’t many flashbacks or cinematic devices. There are a lot of POV shots. It worked for me. If you don’t go in wanting to see the movie, though, it may well leave you uninspired. But for me it was the best thing I’ve seen in quite a while.