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Movie Reviews -
Drama and Suspense
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Written by Matthew J. DeReno
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Monday, 12 April 2010 11:21 |
 Capote is a film about a legendary and flamboyant writer, Truman Capote, and how he crafted one of the great books of American literature, In Cold Blood. The film centers on how Capote becomes emotionally connected to the people involved and affected by the slaughter of the Clutter family,which took place one evening in 1959.
The fact that this film is based on a true story is chilling. The Clutters were a well-respected, Midwestern family of rock solid values. The death of the Clutters, who were all executed with a shotgun blast, one by one, rocked the town to its very core.
Truman Capote was larger than life, an artist of great intelligence, who saw humanity where it would least likely to be found, in a killer. I don't think he set out to do that, but he did so in the course of writing a book he thought would be good and different just because of its subject matter and his approach. He was right. Some call In Cold Blood the first nonfiction crime novel, a book that invented a genre and changed what is possible with writing.
Like the book, the film is extremely powerful and the acting is outstanding across the board. Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Capote was well deserving of all the accolades. Watching Hoffman act out the discipline of Capote was enough to shame me as a writer. The film captures what it is to truly practice writing as an art form and not as a trade. In his performance, Hoffman underscores how you need the right people behind you too; people that will invest in the kind of time and patience it takes write a book like In Cold Blood.
It is more than simply building an inverse pyramid and filling alliterative sentences with words and spaces:
Great writing and great writers that produce it are emotionally involved in their projects much like Capote was with his murderers of the Clutters.
Truman Capote was brave to do what he did. He went into the prison cell of a man who murdered a family and wanted too understand everything about him; why he did what he did; why he undertook that process. Capote learned something perhaps unexpected that humanity too lurks in killers.
I should be clear. I didn't feel bad one bit that these killers got hung at the end. I didn't really feel bad for Capote either.
Capote became world famous after In Cold Blood. As the film points out, he never finished another story. I don't think he could have. He put far too much of his on blood into In Cold Blood. This film conveys that story exceedingly well.
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