Unfortunately, whatever advantage the moviemakers gain from their knowing detachment is discounted by the fact that they take for granted the greatness of In Cold Blood. Thus, no matter what they reveal about Capote, the supposed greatness of the book implicitly serves to justify his behavior. In this way a bracingly disinterested assessment of the artist's character inevitably becomes a conventional romance about the creation of his "masterpiece."
Having read some of the still-unfinished manuscript, William Shawn opines that In Cold Blood will change the way people write. If Shawn said, "write nonfiction accounts of crimes," the claim might have some merit but even then I'm not sure. (Janet Flanner's 1934 Vanity Fair article about the Papin sisters, "The Murder in Le Mans," is for me a touchstone in this area. Flanner's piece is included as a bonus on the DVD of Murderous Maids (2000), which is based on it.) If In Cold Blood is a great book, it's an extremely unusual one. No question, the prose is expertly judged; the subject matter is incapable of infecting Capote's style with the least coarseness. (The movie does not make a strong case for it, however, by showing Capote reading aloud from the book at Town Hall; the prose is better read than spoken, especially when it's spoken by someone convinced of the poetic perfection of every metaphor.) What's unusual about the book is the point of view, or, rather, the points of view.
In the movie Capote and Lee are seen laughing in Kansas over the cultural wasteland they've found themselves in. Later, Capote, still in Kansas, cracks a joke over the phone to Lee who tells him the situation doesn't strike her as funny anymore and he backpedals. The transition from amused disbelief to a more earnest connection is thus shown in the movie to be a progression over time, but that's not how the book reads. In the early sections, the descriptions of Mr. Clutter and his chipper, industrious daughter Nancy are pure poker-faced camp. Mr. Clutter is a right-wing Republican, "a die-hard community booster," a 4-H chairman. He's a generous man but an upright, teetotaling, pious citizen of the prairies, a wooden archetype somehow living. Nancy, "the town darling," Becky Thatcher in a high school production of Tom Sawyer ("Good as anything on TV," a farmer's wife exults), "champion cherry-pie maker," and inhabitant of a "girlish" bedroom, "as frothy as a ballerina's tutu," is her father's daughter—she takes off her basketball-star boyfriend's ring to put him on probation for having drunk a beer. In other words, Nancy is almost too '50s to be real. Nancy's chatter on the phone with her best friend and the excerpts from her diary (a "literally tear-stained" page notes her "first REAL quarrel with Bobby") put me in mind of the eruptive, synthetic teens in the satirical musical comedy Bye Bye, Birdie (1963). Which is a bit uncomfortable, seeing as the only reason Capote is writing about her is that she had her face blown off with a shotgun.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Fine delineation of the distinction between instinctive acting and method acting. I'm assuming here that Hoffman is in some form a method actor
Vikram (?) did a documentary on In Cold Blood a couple of years back. Have you seen that?
2 - Alan Dale
Hey Aaman,
Thanks for the comment. Hoffman doesn't strike me as a Method actor, exactly, in the Brando mold. He seems more methodical than Method, doing the work from the outside in as much as the inside out. He's very good, but lacks the detachment, the point, the high-style flair of other obvious actors, like John Malkovich, for instance.
I haven't seen that documentary--do you know the name or any other identifying info?
3 - Aaman
Ah, I was mixing up James Ellroy and Truman Capote - the filmmaker is Vikram Jayanti and the documentary is James Ellroy's Feast Of Death