FINAL CUT: Answered Prayers

With only days to go before the Oscars would shock everyone and crown Crash as their champion, Clair decided that we needed to tick off one more Best Picture nominee from our list. Which is how we ended up in a crowded theater to see Philip Seymour Hoffman go for the gold in Capote.

Our filmmakers do something very smart right off the bat: they shove Truman Capote in our face. There's Hoffman in all his glory, voice pitched as high as Henrietta Pussycat, mincing around with his pinky in the air, striving to outdo only himself in bitchiness. Here's the star of our show, the man whose name is the title. Capote is such on over-the-top figure, it's essential that we see him as over the top as he can get, so that he can't shock us later on. The movie innoculates us against him. And Hoffman must be grateful for that, because he's going to be keeping up this act for two hours, and if all we can focus on are the weird voice and the effete mannerisms, we're going to totally miss the acting.

The acting matters because the real story here is the way a man can destroy his own soul. Our tale gets going in earnest when Capote reads an article about the grisly murder of a family in rural Kansas. This leads him and his childhood friend Harper Lee (the same one who writes To Kill a Mockingbird, essayed quietly by Catherine Keener) to head out to Kansas, where Capote will ingratiate himself into the community and eventually get close to the two men who committed the heinous crime. Here's where Capote puts his soul up for bid, because the only way he can get the full story is to befriend one of the murderers.

I don't normally like to write a review that just recaps the action, but it's essential to understand that the film pivots on the relationship between Capote and killer Perry Smith (a mousy Clifton Collins, Jr.). Smith, lonely and suffering from an inferiority complex, looks to Capote for validation and friendship. Capote can barely form a healthy relationship (he consistently chooses his story over his lover, and bribes a train porter to impress his traveling companion), but he encourages Smith as long as he thinks it will help him tell his story, to the point of helping with appeals if only to keep the convicted men alive until he can get every last detail. And that's where the majesty of Hoffman's performance becomes clear. His guilt over controlling the fates of two men manifests itself in depression and alcoholism, which aren't necessarily ideal for film. But Hoffman crystallizes the decline of the gregarious fame hound we met at the beginning of the movie. More than any image, I remember the sight of Capote curled up on a bed, nearly catatonic at the thought of witnessing the execution. Death doen't frighten him, but the notion that he engineered it for his own ends is paralyzing.

But I'm not going to kid you. Capote is a slow film. It's a psychological portrait, and you're never going to see a psychological portrait directed by Michael Bay. At least once, I could feel myself drifting towards slumberland as the characters spoke in hushed tones. That is, until director Bennett Miller re-creates the crime scene in a sudden burst of shocking violence, brilliantly composed and edited. It's to Miller's credit that he manages to convey the horror of these murders so vividly, especially at a time when we frequently feel numbed to screen violence. It's to his debit, perhaps, that the story requires this jolt to reinforce the gravity of the story.

Capote was a much better film than I was prepared to see. If you have any knowledge of Truman Capote, your mind will inevitably focus on the prissy drunk who would show up on The Tonight Show. But the movie of his life is after something a lot more interesting. And while it takes it's time, it definitely gets there. In any good biography, you hope to learn things about the subject that you never knew. At this, Capote succeeds. It shows that Truman Capote was a human being after all.