Capote

In 2002 Nicole Kidman played one of the most memorable portraits of an author ever committed to the screen. Her introspective rendering of the troubled genius that was Virginia Woolf in The Hours gave us an insight into the thought and literature of that great woman. We saw, through Kidman and the ensemble cast, the effect of one of her books (Mrs Galloway) and a token of the rarefied insight she made into human relationships.

Woolf, like Truman Capote, changed the course of literature by developing a new way of writing: with Woolf it was "stream-of-consciousness," with Capote the "non-fiction novel." Like Capote, Woolf remained isolated within her world, but in her case the isolation was created by mental instability and a society that was unready, or unwilling, to embrace her ideas, such as women's liberation. Capote's isolation was due to his own unresolved personality issues, having been badly treated as a child, and then finding that he did not "fit," although mostly it was due to the conscious way that he approached his work.

Capote, the film, is a slow, multilayered, sophisticated and understated melodrama about an incredibly complex character, and is brilliantly accomplished. It avoids the pitfall of trying to sensationalise the visually uninspiring act of writing, but equally circumvents placing the "creative process" into some stereotypical niche. What we end up with is a powerful, moving account of a key period in the life of this particular author and, by detailing the way he obtained his material, psychologically more than physically, and the disintegrating effect his method has upon him, which offers a rare insight into the self-imposed remoteness within which he creates a work of genius.

The film is less of a biopic than an exploration of a thought process and the commonality between the mind of Capote and that of the convicted criminals he is writing about. On another level, it is concerned with moral dilemmas of journalistic research and yet on another, the psychology of murder.

Although Capote enjoyed an enviable reputation as a novelist amongst the New York literati, his main claim to fame at the start of this film is Breakfast At Tiffany's, from which Blake Edwards had made a popular movie with Audrey Hepburn in 1961.

While glancing through a newspaper, looking for ideas for a short story, he happens upon a report of a family in Kansas that had been brutally murdered. He travels there, intending to report the case for The New Yorker, and is allowed access to police reports and, after the killers are apprehended, to them as well. One of these, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr), is literate and intelligent. Moreover, he had had a difficult childhood, like Capote, and had fallen in with a bad crowd. He was from the "dark underbelly" of America, people that respectable folk knew little of and cared even less about.

After a while, Capote realises that there is enough material for a major book. He works Perry for details, examines the corpses in the funeral home, studies police photographs and even achieves a delay in the executions while he finishes his research.

One of his party tricks is to demonstrate that he has "94 per cent recall of any conversation," observing and remembering the minutest detail. He studies people; he sees their motivations; he asks himself why, often automatically knowing by logical inference. He does all this in a professional capacity, accurately researching, but on the way it gives him immense power, which he doesn't hesitate to use.

He tells a heartbreaking story from his own life in the full knowledge that it will encourage the police chief to see a similarity with his own pain and thence open up to him. He does a similar trick with Perry, emphasising their similarities. Perry mistakes this for empathy and caring and forms an attachment to Capote (as well as telling him what he wants to know).

But the similarities between Perry and Capote are such that Capote is affected, or would be if he didn't see his "friendship" as little more than a tool to help him achieve literary ambition. He finds an entry in Perry's diary that is an acceptance speech, just in case, one day, people ever thought enough of him to want to thank him for something. Perry's whole life was one of being desperate for recognition.

When Capote receives a standing ovation for a preview reading in New York of his work-in-progress, we see him barely able to contain his emotion. He wants to be acknowledged, needs to be acknowledged, and it becomes a driving force that is also an overriding obsession.

In any other circumstances, Capote and Perry might have formed some sort of lasting bond, but the barrier is not their social nor legal standing, it is the overriding importance of Capote's book. He finds a decent lawyer to lodge appeals against the sentence and buy time. He turns the "friendship" on and off to inveigle details of the murders from Perry, who finds recalling the night of the killings impossible to bear.

When Capote has what he needs, he is eager for the executions because he cannot finish what he calls his "non-fiction novel" until there is closure. A last minute reprieve would undo the whole of the book. Even at the greatest triumphs of fellow authors who support him, he is oblivious to their success, unable to join in the celebrations, just getting drunk and wallowing in paranoid self-obsession, because Perry and his accomplice have not yet been hanged. Why fuss about the trivial achievements of others?

Capote's fixation with writing In Cold Blood is total. Ignoring the need for friendship, he is at the mercy of his professional desires and misses out on the joy of giving that is at the core of any relationship. Genius is not enough.

Philip Seymour Hoffman pulls off a triumph of acting. He has brought the brilliance and misery of Truman Capote to the screen in a way that is more transparent than one could hope for in the depiction of such a multifaceted and unusual person. Catherine Keener, as the ever-supportive Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird, who accompanies Truman to Kansas, performs a superb balancing act, empathetic, warm and endlessly forgiving.

Bennett Miller's film comes across as a labour of love and one eminently worthy of several viewings. The lessons we learn are less about the greatness of the writer and more about his shortcomings. As he later recalls, during that period of terminal decline after In Cold Blood was published to universal acclaim, more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.