There's a wonderful moment in Capote (among countless others) that captures the defeat concealed in triumph. The writer, played with such vibrancy by Hoffman that you quickly forget the effeminate mannerisms and lisping speech, is on a theater stage reading passages from his then-unpublished nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, about the murder — and murderers — of a Kansas family in the fall of 1959. He begins at the beginning — "The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat fields of western Kansas, a lonesome area that the other Kansans call 'out there'" — and after he is finished, the black-tie crowd, assembled by New Yorker editor and Capote confidant and cheerleader William Shawn (Bob Balaban), leaps to its feet. Capote backs away from the lectern and begins to weep, and we are left to wonder why. Is he proud of his achievement, which he has insisted will revolutionize journalism and literature, or ashamed of how he accomplished such a feat by manipulating, using and ultimately betraying killers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith?
That's the question ultimately asked by screenwriter Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller, both first-timers at the feature-film game. Theirs isn't just a story about how Capote wrote his masterpiece; it's also about the toll it took on him. Writer and director follow as the successful, beloved life of the party ultimately destroys himself writing about two killers — one, Hickock (Mark Pellegrino), a grubby small-timer; the other, Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), a man who fancied himself considerate and literate, not all that different from Capote. (Capote, too, would see himself reflected in Smith, with whom he sort of fell in love; of Smith, Capote says in the film, "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house, and he went out the back door while I went out the front.")
By focusing on the four-year period during which Capote researched, with his childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener, as earthy here as dirt on a boot heel), and wrote In Cold Blood, Futterman and Miller capture the sea change that took place in Capote. He begins the movie as a small man who seemed somehow a foot taller in appearance. But as the story unfolds, as Hickock and Smith are captured and tried and imprisoned, Capote begins to unravel. Their story becomes too much his story, and he begins to lose himself in the telling of what was meant to be a tidy little tale. By the end, Capote is an outright alcoholic, praying for the death of his two new friends so he can finish his goddamned book. The little man seems to fold into himself, exhausted and more than a little ashamed. Hoffman's is among the year's finest performances because it doesn't feel like one at all. How often does one see a masterpiece about a masterpiece?
