Capote **** (2005, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Clifton Collins Jr, Catherine Keener) – Classic Movie Review 796

Philip Seymour Hoffman won the 2006 Best Actor Oscar for his eye-catching, brio performance as the destructively selfish gay author Truman Capote in director Bennett Miller’s gruelling, disturbing and depressing story of the five years Capote spent on his last, greatest and most famous book, In Cold Blood. If Hoffman gives a slightly caricatured, one-note turn, it’s still very compelling and a total tour-de-force. He won the Golden Globe and Bafta Best Actor awards too.

In 1959, Capote reads about the horrific murder of a family of four in Holcomb, Kansas, and he travels with Lee to the town to research for an article about it for The New Yorker. He is inspired to expand the project into In Cold Blood.

Though the film rambles on in interminable detail, it never really explains why Capote is so fascinated by the case of the slaughter of a family by two thieving drifters, why fellow writer Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) is so loyal to the ill-named Truman, or his hot-and-cold attitude to one of the killers, troubled prisoner Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr).

With notable performances all round, especially from Keener and Collins Jr, who are both outstanding, it is very worthwhile as an acting showcase, as an anti-capital punishment appeal and as food for thought. But, nevertheless, the movie’s a frustrating, drawn-out downer.

There were four other Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Adapted Screenplay (Dan Futterman) and Best Supporting Actress (Catherine Keener).

It won the American Film Institute Movie of the Year award. They very generously said: ‘Capote is a vividly detailed portrait of an elusive American literary icon at a turning point in his life. Philip Seymour Hoffman inhabits Truman Capote in a performance that captures every nuance of one of the 20th Century’s most flamboyant and intriguing characters – layering wit, pain, love and ambition in a crucible of creative and ethical choice. The filmmakers tell this revealing story with economy and power showing how the writer achieved everything he ever wanted and lost his soul.’

That last bit is the depressing bit, of course.

Director Bennett Miller and writer Dan Futterman re-teamed for 2014’s Foxcatcher.

http://derekwinnert.com/foxcatcher-%C2%BD-2014-steve-carell-channing-tatum-mark-ruffalo

You wait for years for a film about Capote then two come along at once. Infamous (2006) is another film about the author, starring Toby Jones as Capote, Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee and Daniel Craig. The London Critics Circle handed Jones their British Actor of the Year award.

Tragically, Philip Seymour Hoffman died on February 2 2014, aged 46, from an apparent drug overdose in his New York City apartment. Awarded a Best Actor Oscar for the 2005 film Capote, he checked into rehab in May 2013 for heroin use.

Born in Fairport, New York, in 1967, Hoffman began his career in the early 1990s with a guest role in TV’s Law & Order, but broke through to the movies in 1992 in four films, including Scent of a Woman.

He acted in The Getaway and Nobody’s Fool, and five films for Paul Thomas Anderson, Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love and The Master, as well as earning acclaim for performances Happiness, Flawless, The Talented Mr Ripley, Red Dragon, Almost Famous and Capote. He was currently filming The Hunger Games: Mockingjay.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 796

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