The whole thing is eerie and yet oddly familiar. The brutal slaying on November 15th, 1959, of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas was one of the first 'home invasion' stories that shook America to the core for the sheer brutality of the crime. It unsettled the population not just in Holcomb, but everywhere.

Of course, the book, In Cold Blood, written by Truman Capote, is about these killings and if we are to trust the film Capote, he got the idea from the press clipping in the New York Times the next morning and then telephoned his editor at the New Yorker (William Shawn at the time, who had a long and impressive tenure before Tina Brown was appointed editor) and said simply, "I've found my next story." Soon, what started out as an article quickly became a full-length book that would take consume several years of Capote's life.

No doubt a great deal of research went into the making of Capote just as Capote put four years of his own life into the making of the book In Cold Blood and getting to know the murderers themselves, even to the point of having mixed feelings about them - on the one hand seeing and knowing what they were capable of, and yet also seeing them as men and not monsters. As Capote says in the film, "It is as if he (Perry) and I had grown up in he same house...only he went out the back door and I went out the front."

In the final account, all of this matters, but the highlight of this film is really the acting of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote, along with a terrific supporting cast of characters such as Catherine Keener as Harper Lee (author of To Kill a Mockingbird) and Chris Cooper as the detective on the case. Nobody could have played Capote as convincingly as Hoffman does, down to the voice, the mannerisms, the quick wit, and the self-interested aspect of Capote's character that could be cruel and even manipulative to get what he wanted, which is exactly what he did with the two men indicted for the Kansas murders - Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Dick Hickock (Mark Pellegrino).

It was Perry especially that he led along, constantly pumping him for more information for his book, even to the point of providing both convicted felons with better counsel to keep them alive longer, for purposes of getting yet more information for his book.

No doubt, Capote never thought for a second that they stood a chance of getting off or even of winning a stay of execution which would have drawn out the writing of the book long after Capote had most of the information he needed. At a certain point, it became a grim death vigil as Capote waited for the men to die (by hanging) so that he could finish he book, and although the title was decided upon about mid-point in the process, he tells Perry Smith, "I don't yet have a title; I haven't written a word," an outright and self-serving lie to keep Perry talking, as Capote not only had a title, but was on the final and last part of the book.