Based on a Tru story
CAPOTE
An eccentric genius invents a genre.
With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Chris Cooper,
Clifton Collins Jr.
Screenplay by Dan Futterman, based on the biography by Gerald Clarke
Directed by Bennett Miller
BY ALL ACCOUNTS Truman Capote was a horrible man: unhappy, self-absorbed, and bitterly insouciant, albeit a delight at his generation's It parties, where he dropped names, told stories (always titillating, sometimes salacious), and drank himself to death. His masterpiece, In Cold Blood, which invented a new genre of writing, the "nonfiction novel" - the name itself is at least a paradox and perhaps an oxymoron - came to its highest fruition only through his emotional manipulation of a condemned murderer, with whom he may have fallen in love.
He published the book in 1965, died of alcoholism in 1984, and didn't complete another book in between. After excerpts from Answered Prayers, his too-thinly veiled roman-á-clef, appeared in Esquire in 1975, he became a pariah in his beloved social circles, and all invitations ceased. Upon hearing of Capote's death, Gore Vidal reportedly quipped, "Good career move."
In Capote, which dramatizes the writing of In Cold Blood, the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman recreates his subject's nasal lisp and cavalier humanity with such precision that it becomes distracting, just as Capote himself always did. Is it even possible to cut through so much carapace of personality to find the tender meat inside? Hoffman occasionally does in his book-rule brilliant performance: It's Rorschach acting, onto which we either project our own interpretation, or just allow ourselves to be dazzled by its mimetic perfection.
Capote opens on Nov. 15, 1959, when a teen-age niece of the Clutter family arrives at their rural Kansas farmhouse to find father, mother, son and daughter murdered. When Capote, in New York, reads an account of the crime, he calls William Shawn (Bob Balaban), the editor of The New Yorker, and declares his intention to write about it. He departs for Kansas that night, leaving behind his companion, Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood), and taking with him a Southern gentlewoman friend, who will serve as his cultural translator among the suspicious Kansans he'll need to woo into confession. The friend is Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), who's on the verge of publishing a novel of her own.
At the sheriff's office, he introduces himself and his Bergdorf scarf. He does nothing to mask his, shall we say, delicacies. But the town's chief law officer, Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper), is secretly honored to meet the author of Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Soon Truman and Nelle begin having comfortable dinner parties with Dewey, his wife and their two sons.
All that leaves for Capote to conquer are the killers. Richard Hickock is a handsome, charming, strapping Philistine. Capote pays him no attention. But Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) is different: smaller, sadder, and with a good vocabulary and a placid voice. Over the next few years, Capote seduces him into talking about his terrible, lonely childhood (just like Capote's), and ultimately, he reveals all the bloody details of what happened at the Clutter home.
This is the peripheral story of Capote directed by Bennett Miller, and written by the actor Dan Futterman from Gerald Clarke's biography. The rest of the film is a subtle effort to reveal the darkest heart of its difficult central figure. It's often effective, and also a bit coercive: To draw us into Capote's sympathies, Miller withholds details of the crime until Perry recounts them late in the drama. But Capote read the police reports and attended the trial, so we could easily have witnessed the horror much earlier than we do.
Did Truman take advantage of Perry to win his confidence and his confessions? Did he ever really empathize, despite their common emotional pain? Why does he stop visiting him for long periods of time? Did the love die as soon as the writer got what he needed? Did the relationship become too disturbing? Or, as Perry waited to die, did this monumentally selfish writer simply wither under the "harrowing" pressure of waiting to publish his book, which he knew would earn him his coveted fame, but which he couldn't do until he had an ending - that is, an execution, which the appeals delayed for four years.
With an already an unsympathetic figure on its hands, Capote makes that case disturbingly well. There's very little left to admire of Capote when it's over except his vivid writing, regardless of how he got the story, and whether or not it's all true. (Capote frequently lied to Smith or deceived him, and he fabricated scenes in his book.) We go back and forth in Capote, trying to understand this character and penetrate Hoffman's captivating imitation. The fact that we finally can't is either a testament to a skillful drama or an emblem of its shortcoming.
One thing is clear about Capote: Without Nelle's gentle persuasions, Truman might never have been able to get the interviews that he did. Literary lore has always whispered that Capote repaid Lee by writing (or re-writing) To Kill a Mockingbird. We know he took the photograph of her for the book's dust jacket.
Lee, of course, is a legendary phantom: She's almost 80 now, and she hasn't said more than a word or two since publishing her only book. That's why Keener - distant, sullen, extra dry - is the perfect actress to portray the one person who, over and over again in Capote, gives us permission to dislike Truman by dismissing his pathetic egomania and cold brilliance with a few precise words and a lean, accusatory glare.
Tru enough.
INFAMOUS
In this version, the writer and the killer go all the way.
With Toby Jones, Daniel Craig, Sigourney Weaver, Peter Bogdanovich
Written and directed by Douglas McGrath
In a drama based on the life of a famous liar, how much should we believe about what the filmmaker tells us? Is his subject his creative muse as well?
We'll never really know what happened between Truman Capote, the author of In Cold Blood, and Perry Smith, one of the two killers portrayed in the book. But in Infamous, the second movie in two years based on the story of the book and its creation, writer/director Douglas McGrath makes it clear: Truman was tragically in love with Perry, and Perry was tenderly in love right back.
If Capote was the downtown version of how the unapologetically flamboyant little author researched and wrote this famously first "nonfiction novel," then Infamous is the more uptown take. No wonder: Writer/director Douglas McGrath (Emma) based his screenplay on a book by George Plimpton, who rubbed as many cultural elbows in his career as Capote did.
And so we get some playful celebrity-as-celebrity casting. Gwyneth Paltrow is the singer Peggy Lee (she opens the movie warbling, passably, "What Is This Thing Called Love?"); Peter Bogdanovich is the amiably gruff publisher Bennett Cerf; Juliet Stevenson is Diana Vreeland, the pasty-faced socialite-editrix; and Sigourney Weaver, the daughter of famous NBC executive Pat Weaver, is Babe Paley, the wife of famous CBS executive Bill Paley.
Capote chose art-film fave Catherine Keener to portray Truman's friend, the novelist Nelle Harper Lee. Here it's Sandra Bullock, whose coolly hip and assertive interpretation, compared with Keener's diffident one, is closer to what we know about the reclusive writer. And in Infamous, Truman bonds with hunky Daniel Craig as Perry Smith. It's a wonder he doesn't just resolve himself into a dew. Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis and Isabella Rossellini round out the impressive-to-famous cast.
This is all great fun for film and literary buffs, as is Infamous, which is an impressive production and a primer for a lively evening of conversation. You can compare it to its Oscar-winning predecessor if you like, or you can talk about how much of it to believe, and whether McGrath actually wants us to take it as fact (doubtful) or simply absorb it as cultural and psychological metaphor.
The period detail is wonderful - Nelle leaves Holcomb, Kan., where the murders took place, on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe - and the swing of tones and emotions is sometimes startling. Infamous is the gay version of this story, at times even the camp version, part parody and dissection of the soirée classes, part procedural about the writing of the book and the unraveling of its writer.
Infamous and Capote essentially tell the same story, with one intriguing departure: This time, Capote lets Perry read his work in progress and explains the title in a way that quells Perry's feeling of betrayal (in Capote, Truman lied and said his book was not called In Cold Blood). And then there's the sex between them: a near rape, a passionate kiss, and an unrequited longing to grow closer. Somehow this all seems highly unlikely to have taken place between a diminutive writer and a muscular killer in a prison cell. And yet.
At the celebrity-filled social gatherings that gave life to Truman's self-esteem, the script of Infamous almost seems to be intentionally banal. At other times, it's literary and refined. Nelle and Truman have a nasty argument about whether there can be such thing as a "nonfiction novel," or whether the latter necessarily compromises the verity of the former. Truman says he's creating "a new kind of reportage." "Fine," says Nelle, who has just won a Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird, "it's your book." And to his childhood friend, who never wrote a second book, he rejoins: "Yes, my seventh."
McGrath opens and closed Infamous with a lovely bit of irony: We see Capote writing the first two words (that is, the title) of Answered Prayers, his suicidal roman á clef that dished on hundreds of his closest friends - and ended his invitations to their parties when an excerpt appeared in Esquire. It's a tragic joke that frames the story and that McGrath doesn't explain. His dialogue has lots of zingers, some of them witty, some of them bitter, and some a little of both. Truman observes that Perry "has the tender and the terrible side by side inside him." Did he know he was talking about himself as well? He realizes that he can "alchemize what wounds me into art," whereas Perry - who drew, sang and played guitar, never to any recognition - could not.
Infamous isn't superficial, but neither is it overtly deep: It gives us plenty of evidence to parse the characters on our own. The acting, always very good, is sometimes slightly theatrical, but that may just be the camp element of it (better done without, harmless in the end). No doubt working for very little money, the actors clearly relish their opportunities, and when Truman's lady friends twist to Chubby Checker at one of their drunken parties, it's sublimely entertaining.
There's a level of self-awareness to this version of Capote, portrayed by British actor Toby Jones, that we didn't see in Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning portrait. Even the movie's title recognizes this: It first appears on screen as "I Famous," with the "n" creeping into place only after a few significant seconds without it. Jones is one of those amazing dead ringers: He was born to play this role the way Robin Williams was born to play Popeye. He's so flamboyant and insouciant that he takes a while to get used to, especially in the shadow of Hoffman's more introspective performance. Both are strong interpretations, and whether you prefer one or the other is a question of taste. For that matter, so was Truman Capote.