Capote (2005)
The Cast
Philip Seymour Hoffman ... Truman Capote
Catherine Keener ... Harper Lee
Chris Cooper ... Alvin Dewey
Bruce Greenwood ... Jack Dunphy
Clifton Collins Jr. ... Perry Smith
Mark Pellegrino ... Dick Hickock
Bob Balaban ... William Shawn
Marshall Bell ... Warden Marshall Krutch
Biopics these days are pretty much a dime a dozen. Studios use them as sure-fire Oscar nominated performances in their advertising, the actors receive tremendous critical praise, and everyone says "You will believe so-and-so IS famous dead person," even though 99.9% of us had never met the famous dead person and only feel connected to them through their successes or highly publicized failures. It's gotten to the point where I believe that the Academy Awards should create a new category for Best Impersonation Performance of the Year. I'm sure Forest Whitaker's impersonation of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland was spot-on, but does that mean he acted better than Ryan Gosling did in Half Nelson? In my books - the only books you can count on - it doesn't.
Hopefully you can see where I'm going with this. Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for his portrayal of Truman Capote in this movie, directed by almost-first-timer Bennett Miller. Right off the bat I'm going to say that yes, Hoffman's performance was great, excellent even. But I don't put that performance on the same level of Heath Ledger and Terrence Howard's Oscar-nominated performances the same year. Ledger and Howard created these characters out of broad strokes found in their scripts or screenplays. They didn't have decades of source material and personal rememberances to base their performance on, and no my entire review isn't just going to be about Oscar-bitching, although why Rich Little has never won anything blows my mind.
Capote isn't even that much of a biopic. Whereas with movies like Ray and Walk the Line, the entire film was pretty much the formative years, the glory years and the gory years and then a little post-script saying when they died, Capote only sets its sights on the period of Truman Capote's life that he was writing In Cold Blood. True, In Cold Blood was Capote's most critically heralded work and the true story it was based on is certainly intriguing. Hey, maybe they should make a movie or two about that book. Basically the plot of Capote is nothing better than one of those bonus DVD features about the making of the movie, only in this case the book.
Which isn't to say that Capote isn't a good movie, it just feels redundant to me. It felt like a brief snapshot in the life of this man whom might be more interesting if I saw him doing anything other than conversing with a convicted murderer, trying to get to the root of why he killed those people, just so he could write his book. The more I write about this, the more pissed off I get. I like Hoffman, I think he's a tremendous actor and all, but I think it's a shame that this will be the role that he'll always be associated with.
Anyways, the movie is good, a dark journey into the mind of an artist and the sacrifices he makes for his art and so forth. It features many great performances and actors and it's nothing I'll ever watch again. Seriously, it felt more like the first in a series of Capote biopics, focussing only on In Cold Blood with the next instalment to be Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's Club or something less witty than that (which would be hard to do). Check it out if you want to I guess, or not if you prefer that as well. It's not a life-changing movie, it probably won't inspire you to do anything other than convincingly imitate someone famous and dead so you can have your own Oscar.
3 / 5