In sharp contrast, Capote treats the "strange," timid, apologetic Mrs. Clutter, an emaciated, neurasthenic invalid with a "helpless, homespun ethereality" who seems to haunt her own home (when she's not away at a psychiatric hospital), and the introverted son Kenyon, who practices cabinetry alone in his basement workshop, fairly tenderly. Capote says that Kenyon "could not conceive of ever wanting to waste an hour on any girl that might be spent with guns, horses, tools, machinery, even a book." He's his mother's child, "a sensitive and reticent boy," too uncoordinated to be good at sports like the other boys, and living "in a world of his own." This split in Capote's attitude between camp and empathy with the weak, the different, the inward, is what marks In Cold Blood as the work of a homosexual of the era despite a nearly total lack of thematic material. (Capote's prose here is not purple but it is lavender.) Nothing in Capote replicates this split in attitude; the closest movies have come would be the difference in how Gus Van Sant views the boys and the girls in Elephant (2003), as I pointed out in my review of it.
Then, when Capote shifts his focus to the murderers, Dick Hickock comes across "objectively" as a strutting braggart, in Dewey's terms, "a small-time chiseler who got out of his depth, empty and worthless." Hickock deals himself out of Capote's game by insisting he's "a normal." Smith on the other hand, a half-Irish, half-Cherokee drifter and dreamer with pained, stunted legs, comes across as a tormented man, a decent person from a self-destructive family who mysteriously snaps into dangerous brutality. (Smith has orphanage experience equal to anything in Light in August; in prison he's still wetting his bed, sucking his thumb, and crying in his sleep for his dad.) To Capote it's as if, of the two killers, only Smith has a soul. (In the movie Capote remarks that he feels as if he and Smith had grown up in the same house, but that Smith left by the back door while Capote left by the front.) Capote's fascination with Smith is even more palpable than his identification with Mrs. Clutter and Kenyon.
As Amy Standen's 22 January 2002 Salon article about In Cold Blood points out, Capote's talent as a reporter lay in his abilities as a listener, and, of course, he didn't have direct experience talking to the Clutters. This doesn't entirely explain the heterogeneity of the tone in the first part of the book, however. In "The Duke In His Domain," his famous 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando, Capote similarly mixes raillery and compassion when dealing with just one person with whom he did sit down for a chat. At the end of the piece, Capote nails Brando's practiced "lantern-slide" method of telling about his mother's alcoholism and decline and still manages to convey the emotionally wrenching sordidness of the facts. In this finale the division in Capote's handling of his subject comes off as quite a journalistic feat; in the much longer arc of In Cold Blood the divisions become fissures.
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