The Two Lives of Truman Capote

It was either my junior or senior year of high school english when we had to read Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. I’d heard of him, but prior to reading this book, Capote was merely a amusignly flaboyant pop figure who occassionally made appearances on The Tonight Show.

Upon reading the compelling true crime novel about the gruesome, random murder of the entire Clutter family, I was perplexed. How could this amazing work have been written by someone I’d seen as no deeper than a tidepool?

Bennett Miller’s Capote takes up this point exactly, showing us the dual life of Truman Capote during the time when he was writing In Cold Blood, between 1959 and 1965. Dan Futterman’s script focuses entirely on this period in Truman’s life, a time that must have been extremely confusing for him.

He’d already written all the books he’d ever complete, other than In Cold Blood, had a movie made from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and was enjoying the New York social scene, where his every anecdote was celebrated as genius. But the decision to pursue what was first to be a New Yorker article about the murders, changed Capote’s life.

The article turned into a book when Capote saw just how much material there was to work with. In the course of researching the book, Capote befriended the two killers, Dick Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.), crossing a line every journalist dares not cross.

The conflict between using his subjects to create an amazing book that defined a whole new genre – “creative nonfiction” – and developing a friendship and identification with Perry in particular, is Capote’s downfall. In fact, as the film points out, he never completed another book after “In Cold Blood,” and after witnessing the executions (at Perry’s request), he was emotionally scarred for life.

Philip Seymour Hoffman gives us a stunning portrayal of Capote. He accentuates his character’s charm and flamboyance in several party scenes, where he is flippant and cavalier, regardless of the subject being discussed. This contrasts sharply with the Capote we see alone or with best friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener).

Then Hoffman gives us an awkward man, one who is weak and unsure of his morals. As time and time again we see him lie to Perry about how he’s going to help him escape execution, when we know he can’t wait for the man to die so he can finish his book, a picture of moral depravity emerges. But Hoffman’s skill carries the character through it all, and we understand his pain and weakness, even as we shake our heads, ashamed of his behavior.

In addition to Hoffman’s magnificent performance, Clifton Collins, Jr., also gives an excellent portrayal of the murderer/star of In Cold Blood. Here again we have a character with obvious moral confusion. Collins is able to take his character out of the realm of “bad guy” and show us something of what Capote must have seen in him in order to write In Cold Blood.

This is an unsettling film, just as In Cold Blood was an unsettling book. The murders, which were committed really for no logical reason at all, are still disturbing to revisit. But the weakness and pain of the central figures are even more disturbing because they show us why bad things happen. The line between respectable and despicable is a shaky one. As Capote puts it in the film: ” It’s as if he (Perry) and I grew up in the same house. Then one day he went out the back door, and I went out the front.”