Capote

In November 1959 Truman Capote spotted a brief New York Times item about the grisly murder of the Clutter family in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote got New Yorker editor William Shawn to hire him to cover the story and went out to investigate with his childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee. (Lee had not yet published To Kill a Mockingbird, which includes a portrait of Capote as a child in the character Dill.) Capote saw so much potential in the Clutter murders for him as a writer he felt his report wouldn't fit in a magazine article; he spent the next six years turning it into the bestselling "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood.

Capote, directed by Bennett Miller from Dan Futterman's script (derived from Gerald Clarke's biography), recreates Capote's experiences in bringing his book to birth. (You can browse the film's press-kit online.) The movie is unusually forthright about Capote's mixed motives as he noses around Holcomb, opening the victims' closed caskets to take a look, charming the culture-loving wife of Alvin Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective in charge of the case, in order to get closer to Dewey himself, and, in particular, seducing Perry Smith, one of the killers, into telling him details that he needs for his book. Capote has something of an obsession with Smith, with whom he identifies as a social reject, and Smith responds to the attention. Once Smith gives up the goods about the night of the murder, however, Capote is through with him. Overall, the only thing of real interest to Capote in Kansas is what he senses (correctly) his book will add to his literary glory.

The movie's approach to its main character is thus coolly ironic--it keeps strict ledgers and uses blood-red ink when accounts fall short. (That the blood is never Capote's further lowers the temperature.) Though Capote thinks of himself as apart from, and above, this flawed, corrupt world he's sashaying through, he's also perfectly comfortable with the ways of the world as is. In Kansas, for instance, he proves adept at everything from well-placed sympathy to flattery to bribery of public officials. And his questionable attitudes and practices don't just involve what he does to get the Clutter story; his literary vanity and envy, and a tart wit that regularly crosses the border into spite, are pretty unsavory as well. Capote's cruelly gleeful reporter's eye for other peoples' faults is blended with a general silkiness--the claws protract through a velvet glove. This allows him to turn an overwhelming need for attention into public spectacle: there's a bitchy-hot zone around him at any social gathering as he entertains the crowd with his uniquely catty form of name-dropping. (James Baldwin and Marilyn Monroe are among the butts here.) The drawling, pampered homunculus has the makings of a monster, a self-made literary Nero who'd burn Manhattan to write an ironic chronicle of other people's reactions to the conflagration. (Of course, when he published "La Côte Basque, 1965" in Esquire in 1975, with all the barely-disguised portraits of his lady socialite friends, it turned out to be an act of self-immolation.)