The movie depends almost entirely on what Philip Seymour Hoffman can do in the lead role. And then the texture of the script becomes a problem. Futterman doesn't shy away from dirty secrets but he tots them up exhaustively in such a way that they don't seem like secrets, like something interior to a human being. And while Hoffman, prey to no vanity, either physical or moral, gives an imaginative representation of every carefully worked facet, it's a stage-trained actor's "faithful" performance, in a historical-character piece with no dramatic shape independent of the biographical timeline. (The movie is this year's Kinsey.) Hoffman's Capote is exactly the characterization that is indicated by the script but no more.

Hoffman isn't colorless, as he is playing the shabby, gambling-addicted bank loan officer in Owning Mahowny (2003). He does, however, have the same self-consciousness that limits him as the gallant-teary cross-dresser in Flawless (1999). Playing that swishy survivor, he always knows where his meaty, limp-wristed hands are, and their moves are too clearly worked out as signature attributes--they flutter like a pair of iron butterflies. In Capote the self-consciousness always seems as much Hoffman's as Capote's--it puts display lighting in the showcase.

Clearly I don't subscribe to Andrew Sullivan's view of Hoffman as "the greatest actor of his generation," not in the movies, anyway. Where are the defining roles? In their range, Paul Giamatti is already ahead of him. Hoffman did give the freshest performance in the Vanessa Redgrave-Brian Dennehy version of Long Day's Journey Into Night on Broadway a few years ago (which I reviewed here). That's a major role and he was stepping into the gigantic shoes of Jason Robards. But in movies he's been more effective in supporting roles; among the cast in Anthony Minghella's yuppie-tourist's version of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), for instance, Hoffman alone had the creepiness to do honor to source-author Patricia Highsmith.

Walk the Line

The writer and director of Capote do half an original job by refusing to romanticize the man. But if they don't romanticize the man, they certainly romanticize his work, which counteracts their first instinct. This still puts them well ahead of the makers of Walk the Line, which offers a disastrously simplistic conception of Johnny Cash--the singer's entire adulthood is presented as the inevitable consequence of a few incidents and facts from his childhood (mean dad, dead brother, love of music). There's even less casualness than in Capote but the details are of a much lower grade. (Cash can't handle a fishing rod without there being a specific link to a childhood scene.)

Walk the Line is frank enough about the fact of Cash's alcoholism and drug addiction, but it adopts an unnuanced sympathy that prevents us from seeing the man straight--as an adult responsible for the messes he gets into, whether he knows it or not. June Carter, the level-headed, down-home singer Cash courts on- and offstage for a decade, sure knows it, but the movie isn't wired to her practicality. The script hints at the immaturity of Cash's fantasies about being a criminal in prison, for instance, but then presents his concert in Folsom Prison (memorialized in a 1968 album) as a heroic morale-booster for the mistreated inmates. (June sang "Jackson" with Johnny at the concert, but the movie doesn't show us her reaction when he jokingly acts out the lyrics to another song by pretending to shoot a woman with his guitar.) There's something adolescent and slack-minded--and generic--about Walk the Line's emphasis on Cash's travails, which are the same as in every other boozy-loser biopic because they haven't been fitted to a complex enough framework, either psychological or dramatic. June is what's different here, and the moviemakers never figure out how to get their narrative with her program. She ends up looking on in dismay like all the other wives of geniuses in the movies. And yet ...