Capote 2005
This is a well-crafted movie that takes its time showing you the story of Truman Capote as he spends six years writing In Cold Blood by interviewing two men to be executed for killing a Kansas family they didn’t know. By “takes it time” I mean that the movie is slow. And towards the end as Truman waits for the men’s appeals to run out and flesh out the final chapter of his book, it becomes agonizingly slow even though we do finally find out what happened during the crime.
I think one thing that appeals to critics is this isn’t a private detective movie with meticulous investigations and courtroom drama. In fact we never hear anything about the evidence that convicted these guys so quickly, and nothing is shown about how they are caught. There are a couple of brief scenes in court, but mostly we just follow Capote as he talks with people, observes, talks about his book, etc. He’s an interesting character and Philip Seymour Hoffman does a good job of bringing him to life. Hoffman really is a great actor, able to perfectly express this guy just as easily as he did rock and roll writer Lester Bangs in Almost Famous.
I never have read the book and am not familiar with Capote’s writing. Some of the lines about how the book would “change the way people write” seemed a little overblown, though I do think the book was a precursor to Hunter S. Thompson’s participatory gonzo journalism. I don’t doubt people of that time thought the book would change writing, but looking back it is hard to say writing has changed that much. Certainly an in-depth story of murder like this would still be at home in magazines like The New Yorker (where Capote worked), Atlantic Monthly, or Harpers. Maybe those magazines didn’t have such stories before then, I’m not sure.
A lesser movie would have felt compelled to make more outsized characters and give Capote a larger role in what he was reporting on. I like that the scale stays fairly small and normal. A movie doesn’t have to be earth-shattering to be good. I’m still not sure the movie deserves to be nominated for Best Picture. Like Good Night and Good Luck it is a little slow, but seems pure. However, I still feel like it is a better movie because it avoids the pretension of being about something bigger than it really is. I’ll give it a B+.
Owned on: Blu-ray