When I was younger I used to think a good movie was one that didn't bore me, because I was kind of an unbearable snob who believed that movies were B-grade art, and good film was at best still in the same class as a second rate novel.
But I am always older than I was and a few nights ago I rewatched Capote, which
is a very boring movie based on a first rate novel based on real life, but nevertheless one of my very favourites. Enough of a favourite that I'm going to write an enormous boring blog post about why it's so great. (And if it wasn't obvious, here be spoilers.)
It's a subtle, understated, gorgeous film. One of the things that sets it apart from other run-of-the-mill biopics is the photography - the palette is full of dreamy greys, blues and browns, and both the establishing wide-angle shots and closeups are carefully composed and detailed. There is a stillness to the shots that is accentuated by tiny movements - a train crawling across the Kansas corn fields, smoke rising from a cigarette, an emphatic twirl of Capote's hand.
(The depth of field in this shot is perfect)
One of my favourite details is the use of the Clutter's real family portraits. The Clutter family was murdered by Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, and the crime was the focus of Capote's novel In Cold Blood.
^^ And this shot from the beginning of the movie, where Capote cuts a clipping from the newspaper story about the crime. It only lasts a few seconds, but sums up how Capote intends to relate to Holcomb and the Clutters: he expects to walk in the town and nip out a neat, discrete story that he can fold up and take with him back to New York. Instead he gets drawn in and inextricably, messily enmeshed with the story.
The other thing that sets Capote apart is how deeply unlikable Hoffman's portrayal of the titular character is. In this movie Truman Capote is a self-centred, dishonest, and capricious drunk, who gets what he wants from people through bribery and manipulation.
Offering Smith aspirin for his cramped legs, and -
bribing the prison warden for unlimited access to Hickock and Smith's cells.
The claustrophobic relationship with the murderer Perry Smith (with whom Hoffman's character is by turns vulnerable, nurturing, manipulative, cruel and redemptive) is what saves the unlikable Capote from being purely unrelatable. He contradicts himself over and over because he's unsure of his own intentions. He needs Smith alive and co-operative for his book, but finds himself enamoured of him and unable to maintain a proper professional distance. He visits the murderers on death row, reads their diaries, visits their families and even goes so far as hiring them a lawyer. There's a scene where Capote spoon-feeds Perry baby food to break his hunger strike. It's a moment of total intimacy and total dependency.
As time goes on, and Capote becomes more and more torn between his affection for the inmate and the need for an ending for his novel, the wheels kind of come off the relationship. He lies to Smith and lets him believe the novel will redeem him to the public, while trading in on the viciousness and callousness of the crime to sell his book in New York. Smith believes the author will help him appeal his death sentence, but in private Capote wishes for an execution and a neat ending. He loses the control he thought he had over his affection for Smith, and it ruins him. There's a shot of him sitting despondent on the couch, pouring whiskey into a jar of baby food to hide his drinking from his partner - it's a self-destructive act that mirrors the nurturing one he offered Smith.
And when, at the end of the movie, Capote meets Hickock and Smith (in chains in the minutes before their execution) and says, distraught:
"I did everything I could."
It's hard to tell who he's trying to fool more, Perry or himself.
In the movie, and more so in the novel In Cold Blood, you get a sense that Capote was desperately clawing through Smith's life trying to find anything that makes sense of his crime. He relates to Smith and sees his own neglected childhood reflected in him. In the movie he says to his friend Harper Lee, "it's like Perry and I grew up in the same house, and one day I got up and went out the front door while he went out the back." He needed to find out how he and Smith were different, why he did what he did, and how one man was capable of murder in cold blood while the other wasn't. As in the novel, when he does get his confession, it's ultimately unsatisfying:
"He was just looking at me...looking into my eyes, like he expected me to kill him. Like he expected me to be the kind of person who would kill him. I was thinking, 'this nice man is scared of me'. I was so ashamed. I mean, I thought he was a very nice, gentle man. And I thought so right up until I slit his throat."
The scene echoes an earlier one where Capote's interviewing a friend of the Clutter's:
"Oh, it's the hardest when people have some notion about you and it's impossible to convince them otherwise. Ever since I was a child folks thought they had me pegged, because of the way I... the way I am. You know, the way I talk. And they're always wrong."
Both men were outsiders in a world where they were constantly butting up against people's expectations of them. They lived in two discrete worlds: Capote in a world of glamour, fame and privilege; Smith in a world of poverty, neglect and violence. This movie deftly, if briefly, explains Capote's fascination with weaving the two spheres together, especially because Clifton Collins Jr.'s portrayal of Perry Smith paints a far more sympathetic picture than the one in In Cold Blood. It's a movie that leaves a lot unsaid, and a lot for the viewer to unpack themselves, but it never strays into cliche or melodrama and repays attentive viewing.
And as a last note, I became a big fan of P.S. Hoffs (as he likes to be called amongst friends) after watching this. I can't wait to see what he does in
The Master with Joaquin Phoenix!
