Capote

About ten years ago, I drove home from work in the dark along Boston’s thoroughfares and highways, riveted not by the lights of other cars, but by a voice coming from my car stereo.  
“But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds imagined on the normal nightly Holcomb noises – on the keening hysteria of the coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotives.  At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them – four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again – those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.”

It was a book on tape, and that book was “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote. Hearing the chilling tale of the Clutter family, murdered in their farmhouse in Kansas in November of 1959, and of the killers who were pursued, caught, and eventually hanged, I was both devastated and amazed by the power of writing at its greatest.

Because the book was so shattering to me, particularly hearing it read out loud in my dark car, I was especially intrigued by “Capote,” the current film starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role, because it focused on the era of Truman Capote’s life during which he was caught up in the investigation and writing of his most famous book.  The film begins with the deaths of the Clutters, and ends with the deaths of the killers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickok, and although there are references to Capote’s earlier life, and an end card telling us that he never finished another book and died of alcoholism, the film has a very tight structure around the “In Cold Blood” period.  A few party scenes let us know what kind of more shallow life Capote was leading prior to the events that so devastated him, so we definitely understand that this six-year period was both the pinnacle of his life and the ruination of him.

The crux of the film is that Capote, while claiming to be an honest man, used the killers, particularly Perry Smith, with whom he developed an almost passionate attachment, in order to further what he called the greatest book of the decade (even before he had begun writing it).  Capote became obsessed with both the book, which he expected would change the world, and with Smith.  He falls in love with Smith, yet manipulates the man in order to learn all that he can about his past, his personality, and ultimately, about what happened that horrible night.  Capote refuses to tell Smith the name of the book he is writing, and when Smith gets a newspaper clipping announcing Capote’s reading from “In Cold Blood,” Capote lies frantically, saying that the event promoters gave it that name.  Smith wants so desperately to believe that Capote is his savior that he accepts the lie.

In the end, Capote spirals downward as the killers continue to receive stays of execution and appeal their case all the way to the Supreme Court.  He can’t complete the book until Smith and Hickok are executed.  To Capote, the delays are a personal attack on himself, and he becomes almost totally paralyzed by his conflicting desires – to finish his book and move on with his life, Smith must die.  

The film is about what it is to be a writer, what it is to be a journalist, what it is to be an outsider, and what it is to be human.  See it.