Sherry Chandler » Capote
Capote
Went down to the Kentucky Theater Tuesday night to see Capote. A cold and blowing November evening with dead leaves skittering on the sidewalk seemed an appropriate time to see this dark film. The Clutters were murdered on November 15, 1959. Yet somehow after four decades that included Charles Manson, Jeffrey Daumer, Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Unibomber, and Timothy McVeigh, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock seem villains out of a more innocent time. Or maybe it was the movie’s gentle treatment.
I haven’t read In Cold Blood since about 1971, but I remember Capote’s portrait of Smith and Hickock as harsher. Maybe it’s because the “nonfiction novel” contains more detail about their lives and their crime. The crime is not the focus of this story. It’s about Truman Capote and the writing.
I don’t know whether “Capote” gets any closer to “truth” than In Cold Blood did — truth, we have learned, can be slippery — but it is an excellent movie with some really good performances, mostly by people whose names and faces I didn’t recognize: particularly Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Capote and Clifton Collins, Jr. as Perry Smith. I will admit, though, that I kept trying to fit Robert Blake’s face over Collins’s, and it wasn’t until I got home and was talking to my husband that I realized why.
Chris Cooper is one person whose name I’m beginning to associate with excellence. As Kansas Bureau of Investigator agent Alvin Dewey, he turns in another fine performance.
If this movie doesn’t necessarily tell the objective truth, it does ask some hard questions about Capote, his relationship to the murderers, and the whole relationship of artist to art. I have long suspected that successful artists have, in addition to talent, a certain ruthlessness. I think I have read that Faulkner once said he’d kill his mother for — what? a good novel? fame? Doesn’t matter. This movie does a great job of exposing that ruthlessness and its consequences for the artist.
Did the so-called novel structure of In Cold Blood mean that Capote had to have a novel-type of resolution? Is this why, in the end, he was glad when Smith was hanged? Or was it because he had gotten in over his head and couldn’t cope any more? How much did Capote use Smith? He certainly lied to him but we all lie to each other. How much did Smith use Capote? Did Capote fall in love with his subject or with his novel? How much of a dark mirror-image of himself did he see in the abused, artistic Smith? Was Capote’s breakdown caused by staring too long into that dark mirror? How much of Capote’s portrait of Smith is an artistic construct these two men collaborated to build?
A maze of questions to get lost in, but this is a movie that asks questions it doesn’t answer. No pat moral. Flawed good guys, vulnerable bad guys. Not exactly a holiday feel-good experience. Probably not going to be a blockbuster. But all us writers should see it.
Possibly related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Leave a comment