Reviewed by Megan Fleming

AUTHOR Truman Capote’s greatest work is the nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. The first novel of its kind, it explores the shotgun murder of a respectable Kansas family by perpetrators Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. The film Capote centres around the years Truman Capote spent writing the book, and the relationship he built with one of the murderers.


The film opens with a close-up the of the Kansas wheat fields dancing bleakly in the dawn; there are wide shots of the Clutter family farmhouse, rimmed by leafless black trees and a clear and empty sky. Truman Capote used this device in his novel – quiet, thoughtful descriptions of landscape, to slow down the narrative and make the reader pause and consider. Although the novel is called nonfiction, there’s no question Capote took liberties with the form. He employed these literary devices to garner sympathy from the reader towards an unexpected subject. He injected themes and complications into ‘the truth.’ In Cold Blood, written in the early sixties, explores the theme of upper-middle class America, its priveliges and blindnesses, and its crippling fear of the unknown.

Truman Capote was nothing less than a brilliant and unusual mind. He interviewed every citizen of the small Kansas town who would spare a minute for the famous writer. He neither recorded nor transcribed any of these conversations, but stored them verbatim in his astonishing memory. Equally astonishing is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Capote. He portrays remarkably the flamboyant New York author who becomes thoroughly involved and thoroughly tortured by his subject. Catherine Kenney plays fellow author Harper Lee, and her honest and sometimes brutal friendship with Capote lends a necessary balance to the film.

Capote’s untold hours of conversation with convicted murderer Perry Smith cannot be more than touched on in this film. The amount of information about both murderers – their personal histories, the details of their movements leading up to and after the murder – is extensive in the book. Two hours on a screen can hardly do it justice. But there are moments when the faces of the author and the inmate fill the screen, absorbing the audience, just as Capote was thoroughly absorbed by his ‘subject’: a murderer portrayed as a sensitive, artistic, aspiring American. An essentially good person who’s been abandoned on the fringes of society. Even his sister distrusts him. He’s a victim. But he’s still accountable for his crime.

Here I should inject this ‘portrayal’ with my own cynicism: I am largely disdainful of biographies. I think most biographical representations distort and pervert the private life of a regular person who happens to be creative, visible, and ‘well-loved.’ I largely see biographers as peeking through the keyhole into a room where a private person is acting out a public life. This is an idea the film itself plays with, especially when we see Truman Capote lifting up the creaking lid of the Clutter family coffins to peer inside.

Continuously throughout the movie, we are allowed to form ideas about the characters. And continuously those ideas are inverted. Capote himself wears many faces: a clever, camp and sardonically funny New York darling; a ruthless writer, ‘pretending’ to befriend a lonely inmate ("in cold blood") to get the story; a true friend and a sympathetic ear, with a history of abandonment and pain as well; and finally, a wretched being, tortured by his self-created moral dilemma. This is what the film is really about. After forming a truthful, meaningful friendship with the murderer, after assisting with appeal after appeal, after three long years, his book is almost finished. His most important work will change the face of the literary scene. But Capote’s friend must hang for his crime before Capote can pen a finale.