But even if Capote had spoken with the Clutters, that wouldn't have got him to the end of his book—Hickock and Smith's executions. Even his darkling identification with Smith can't do that. To wrap things up, Capote takes up against the death penalty and there's something arbitrary about it, though the arbitrariness may be less noticeable because his approach to the material has been so varied all along. Nothing about Capote's protest against capital punishment is memorable. The thing I remember best from this section is an exchange between two journalists: one says that the killers never stood a chance in the courtroom, and sympathizes with Smith because he's had a "rotten life," to which the other guy replies, "Many a man can match sob stories with that little bastard" (which is pretty much the basis of Capote's identification with Smith, as the movie makes explicit). Capote the listener is certainly a better reporter than he is a polemicist—he's too indirect, too insinuating to win a policy debate. I suspect that Capote's attitude toward the execution derived from the fact that he was especially sorry to see Smith die, but also because he wanted his book to have more amplitude than a "mere" account of an infamous crime.
Finally, Capote's patchworking of his material reminds me of Oscar Wilde's Salome, with John the Baptist speaking past the other characters, prophetically, as if straight out of the gospels, Herod and Herodias squabbling like a mismarried couple in a naturalistic drama, and Wilde indulging in Salome's abnormal sexuality decadently, that is, with no reference to morality. As in Salome, Capote's conflicting modes of identification with character and projection into situations distort a story that the author hasn't invented. This means, paradoxically, that although Capote's writing is highly disciplined, In Cold Blood is at the same time exquisitely self-indulgent. It's the work of an artist trying to discover his art and his audience and succeeding at the latter, which is all that's required to make the audience think he's succeeded at the former. But in the case of Capote's crime saga, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Capote doesn't function fully as an independent work; it will mean a lot more if you've read In Cold Blood and know something about the author. And though the script presents an interestingly detached portrait of its impish, narcissistic protagonist, it plays much like any biopic about a genius who "must" go too far in order to go farther than others have gone before. Capote even has two "wives" looking on in dismay as he gives in to temptation—his lover Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood) and Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener). (Dunphy and Lee are the two dedicatees of In Cold Blood.) The wife of the genius is the ultimately thankless role; Keener might have given the performance she's credited with if we saw her fulfilling Nelle's intended function of smoothing the way in Kansas for the flamboyantly effeminate Capote, whose languid coquettishness can't help him because he always seems to be despising people in advance for what they will "inevitably" think of him. (His featherweight voice has a built-in sneer—it reminds you of why "sarcastic" used to be a euphemism for "homosexual.")
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