Capote

When I had the free preview of the movie channels over Thanksgiving, and armed with a nearly empty DVR, I recorded a whole bunch of movies, among which was Capote.

Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a southern-born writer living in the Manhattan social scene of 1959 and writing for The New Yorker. One day he reads a newspaper report of a killing out in Kansas in which two young men were arrested for killing an entire farm family. The article intrigues Capote, who immediately tells his editors at the New Yorker that he's going to do a long-form story on those murders.

So Capote heads out to Kansas with his friend and fellow southerner Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener; and yes, it's the same Harper Lee who would go on to write To Kill a Mockingbird, something which is a plot point in the movie), where he finds a media circus and many people who aren't so willing to talk because, to be fair to them, the murder of an entire family of four in a close-knit community like this is going to be a traumatic experience.

Truman responds by bribing his way into the prison where the two accused killers, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Dick Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) are being held. Truman finds that Perry is sensitive and somewhat more willing to talk, which is a big help to Truman.

But by this time, Truman realizes that the story needs to be told not in a magazine article, but in a full-length book that, in Truman's view, is going to revolutionize storytelling. There's a problem with this, however. Although Perry is opening up -- and Truman is developing an emotional bond with him -- one thing Perry is remaining silent on is exactly what happened in the house the night of the murder. And that's something Truman feels he has to know for his book.

With the execution looming, Truman decides that he's going to help fund the murderers' appeal, if only for the craven purpose of buying himself some more time to get the information out of Perry. This also raises the uncomfortable question of what's going to happen once Truman does get the things he wants from Perry, even if it's all just delaying the inevitable. Of course, we know in real life that the result was the book In Cold Blood, which would be turned into a movie.

But the experience also broke Capote, who was already a pretty heavy drinker and who slipped further into alcoholism as he was writing the book. He was never able to finish another book, and eventually died at the age of 59 as a result of complications from his decades of alcohol abuse.

Hoffman is quite good as Capote, although I have to admit that the film as a whole left me a bit cold, so I don't think I'd give it quite as high marks as most critics have. Not that I disliked it; more that others will like it even more than I have. The movie has received a DVD and Blu-ray release which seems to be on backorder at the TCM Shop but available at Amazon. You can also do the streaming thing at Amazon if that's what you prefer.