Capturing nuance of ‘Capote’

capote{LDQUO}Capote” is a first-rate film that details the six years that author Truman Capote spent writing “In Cold Blood” and the Faustian bargain he made with himself that eventually ruined his life.

Masterfully played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, the actor captures Capote’s odd mannerisms, his fey body language and sweetly lilting voice, without resorting to burlesque humor.

Capote, an out-of-the-closet homosexual and a famous Southern writer who moved freely in East Coast literary circles, travels to 1959 rural Kansas to interview the men responsible for the grisly murders of four members of a farm family, a story that has gained national notoriety.

He takes along his childhood friend, Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), the renowned author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” to act as a go-between, of sorts, a woman of normal appearance and manner who maintains a polite distance between the mincing Capote and the flinty Kansans who cock a wary eye in his direction.

While in Kansas, Capote ingratiates himself at the prison and befriends one of the condemned killers, the sullen, brooding Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), promising him that in exchange for his story, an attorney will be provided who will seek a reversal of Smith’s conviction.

But after obtaining the details of the murders, Capote reneges on his promise.

Smith and his cohort, Richard Hickock, are subsequently hanged for their horrible crime, thus completing the story for Capote’s purposes.

Capote soon becomes isolated in deep regret for his complicity in this squalid outcome.

His intake of alcohol becomes obsessive until we find him in a dimly-lit, lonely hotel room, slouched in a boozy funk with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of scotch in the other.

Via an epilogue, we learn that Capote never was able to finish another book and died some years later of acute alcoholism.

The nuts and bolts aspect of this production is also first rate. The camera work is well executed with none of the herky-jerky effects of a hand-held unit and the musical score is understated, almost muted, and never a distraction.

Director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman, both incidentally, boyhood friends of Philip Seymour Hoffman, have come up with a crisp, cleverly styled story.

This is the finest film I have seen so far this year and I would not be surprised to see it win the Academy Award next spring.

Rated R for language and brief graphic violence, “Capote” runs 1 hour and 49 minutes.

* JEFF KLEMZAK read “In Cold Blood” as a teenager and developed quite an appetite for anything written by or about Truman Capote.

20051012gxkkb2ke(LA)Jeff Klemzak