Read

Movie reviews

Movie news

Newsletters

Interviews

Film festivals

Film awards

Digital magazine

Watch

New movie trailers

Video interviews

Movie clips

LOVEFiLM on the red carpet

Member video reviews

LOVEFiLM movie show

Get Involved

Competitions

Film quizzes

Follow the stars on Twitter

Create your own collections

Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t look much like the novelist Truman Capote. He’s several inches taller and altogether a bigger, bulkier figure. He barely approximates his voice either, which Gore Vidal described as ‘so high only a dog could hear it.’

If you’re curious to see the real Capote (and a very curious fellow he was too) take a look at the 1976 Neil Simon comedy Murder by Death. Simon wanted an unusual villain: a ‘short, pudgy man with a high pitched voice and a tongue as short as a stiletto… someone like Truman Capote’. The filmmakers went one better and cast Capote himself (‘Gore Vidal must be dying’ gloated Truman.)

Judging by Murder by Death, Capote couldn’t have played Capote with anything like the grace of Philip Seymour Hoffman. But he isn’t remembered for his acting abilities – even his enemies allowed Capote was a natural born writer; ‘the best writer of my generation’ avowed Norman Mailer.

In 1959, when the film begins, Truman was basking in the glow of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. His first novel made him the toast of New York’s literary scene, and two years later Blake Edwards’ movie version with Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly would be deemed the height of sophistication.

To go from that to In Cold Blood – a true-crime account of the slaughter of a family of Midwestern farmers by two ex-cons who expected there to be more than pocket change on the premises – that would be like Wes Anderson following up The Royal Tanenbaums with Monster.

Something in the senselessness of the crime caught Capote’s attention. He got on a train to Kansas with his pal Harper Lee (whose own book, To Kill A Mockingbird, was yet to be published) and started interviewing friends of the family for a New Yorker magazine piece.

Although he was a very odd duck for the conservative midwest, Capote parlayed his fame into incredible access to the key players: the local sheriff, friends of the victims, and finally the killers themselves all spoke with him for hours, weeks, years. By the time he was through, it would be five years later and there would a 120, 000 word book that he claimed was the first non-fiction novel.

In Cold Blood was as influential a piece of writing as any book of the last half century: bringing novelistic techniques to reportage, it transformed journalism and the novel, making the former more vibrant, the latter more vital, but also definitively muddying the waters between ‘truth’ and fact. ‘Truman Capote has made lying an art,’ observed Vidal. ‘A minor art.’

Written by Dan Futterman and directed by Bennett Miller (old acting friends of Hoffman’s) Capote the movie finds it useful to explore what Capote the writer left out: namely his own ambiguous role in these lives. He found a defense lawyer for the killers Perry Smith and Richard Hickcock when he needed more interview time with them, thought nothing of lying and manipulating to get them to open up, then dropped them when he needed an ending for his book (ie execution by hanging).

As sheriff Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) comments here, the title of his book could be pointed right back at him. Asked by Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) if he holds Perry Smith ‘in esteem’ (this probably is how writers talked in the 50s), Truman can only reply, ‘Well, he’s a goldmine.’

The film comes down hard on Capote’s ‘betrayal’, implying that his conscience blocked him from completing another book and plunged him into alcoholism. Even so, we don’t entirely lose sympathy with the writer – we sense that it’s his inspiration that drives him on, not financial greed. He was compelled to create his masterpiece.

Truman was probably sincere when he said on another occasion that Hickock and Smith were the closest friends he ever had. In the movie’s most quoted line, Truman tells Harper Lee ‘It’s as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day he went out the back door and I went out the front.’

It’s that complex level of identification across social boundaries that gives the film its emotional wallop – kudos to Clifton Collins Jr as Perry Smith too – and makes this seven year journey stand for much more than a literary footnote.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com