Capote
We're still getting snowed in here in Munich, thalia_seawood came to visit on Sunday, and I watched the Oscars. Not having seen Brokeback Mountain or Crash yet, I have no feeling one way or the other, but I was glad about the best actress, best supporting actress and best actor awards, as they had all been candidates I had been rooting for. (Oh, and George Clooney winning best supporting actor was nice on general principle, since I like him, but I didn't think that role was much of a stretch - though Syriana was a good movie.) Jennifer Garner tripping and carrying it off with aplomp by quipping "I always do my own stunts" was adorable.
This reminds me: I haven't gotten around to posting my thoughts on Capote yet, which I saw last Thursday.
Not having read In Cold Blood yet - though I did read Breakfeast at Tiffany's, so I'm not a compete Capote ignoramus - nor the biography this is based on, I do not know how factual or not a movie this is, but it certainly is a stunning film, and Philipp Seymour Hoffman deserves his Oscar completely. But it's more than his fantastic performance that makes this movie worth watching. Let me put it this way: the comparison with Walk The Line is instructive, because Walk The Line is in many ways, especially narratively, a typical biopic, and while it does paint Johnny Cash as a man with flaws (and not just those kind of flaws the audience really sees as virtues), it definitely makes the effort to keep its main subject likeable. Whereas Capote couldn't care less whether you like Truman Capote. It just cares that you feel challenged to watch him during those few years of his life the movie covers - the research and writing of In Cold Blood - and never makes it easy to make up your mind about him.
Another interesting comparison is with an older film, Dead Man Walking. There are some superficial similarities - in both cases, you have the main character starting to visit and forming a bond with a death cell inmate; in both cases, the prisoner is a murderer whose guilt isn't really in doubt though for the most part of the movie he insists he's not really to blame and refuses to talk about the actual crime; in both cases, the prisoner originally starts to talk to the main character because he believes the main character can do something to sway public opinion about him and stop or change his fate; in both cases, a climactic scene takes place between main character and prisoner as the prisoner finally does confess his crime, which is then followed by the main character watching the execution; and of course both films are based on real life events. But the differences are even more blatant. Because Dead Man Walking makes it confession scene about redemption and compassion, and is in fact in many ways one of the most convincing religious movies I've seen (though I guess the fact that it was directed by Tim Robbins and stars Susan Sarandon means it usually doesn't get classified as such). Whereas in Capote, the confession paradoxically settles the doom not of the prisoner (there is never a real question, even if you don't know the historical facts, as to whether these two killers will get executed or not) but of the main character. But then, Capote isn't about guilt and penance and compassion at all. It is, at its heart, a brilliant and twisted take on the story of the artist and his muse.
In one of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, a painter paints his wife; the portrait gets better and better, his wife gets sicker and sicker, but he doesn't really notice (or does he?), and when he has finished the portrait, his wife crumbles, dead. (Poes own wife, of course, like so many of his heroines died of consumption.) So here we have fellow Southerner Truman Capote, reading in the newspaper about a family murdered in Kansas, and seeing this as an opportunity to write a story, and then, once he starts with the serious research, a novel, a new kind of novel, the non-fiction variety. He ingratiates himself with the locals and the investigators, he ingratiates himself with the killers, spends more and more time with one of them, Perry Smith, listening to his stories, and quite soon realizes his book can only have one convincing ending - the execution of both. They believe he's trying to help them; aside from finding them a lawyer early on, he's really not. But at times he'd like to believe so.
At one point, after Capote has already written about two thirds of his book, he tells his childhood friend, Harper Lee, that his lover Jack thinks he (Capote) is exploiting Perry Smith, but also thinks he has fallen in love with him, and adds that it both can't possibly be true. Harper Lee then asks what is, and Capote replies that he has the feeling that he and Perry Smith grew up in the same house, with Smith leaving through the backdoor and Capote through the front door. The beauty of the film lies in the fact that it really doesn't choose any single one of these easy routes. Capote certainly isn't immune to the fact Smith is good looking, but he's not in love (or just plain lust), either; he does exploit him, but he can only manage this by giving a part of himself in the process, and if the quotes from In Cold Blood we hear are anything to go by, the results are breathtaking prose. Once he has all he needs for his story, he tries to shut himself off from the source, and simultanously wills it to die and is horrified by the actual event. True enough to the Poe model, the portrait is painted, the muse dies. And the artist, having lost his muse, is punished for his presumption by the blocking of his talent from the point onwards. Or so the credits inform us by saying Capote never finished another book, and died of alcoholism (another Poe-esque element). It's the ending the story demands, much like the ending the story Capote was writing had to be the death of the killers. Which means it's immaterial whether or not this diagnosis of the reasons for Capote's unfinished books post-In Cold Blood is correct or not; it is right for this film.
It's always tricky to use a visual medium - film - to describe something so interior and, as far as outward motion is concerned, by necessity static as writing. Which is why films about writers often don't work. (Films about painters have it easier by comparison.) However, the research process wgucg due to the fact Capote has to talk with people as opposed to collecting material in libraries is interactive, allows this film to get across something of the utter absorption, fascination and the lack of mercy the writing process can have, via human interactions. I was reminded of something I found in the diaries of Klaus Mann. (Son of Thomas, very talented, very doomed.) He's busy typing away at what was later recognized as his masterpiece, Mephisto, a novel about an actor going from having a career in the Weimar Republic to having an even better career in the Third Reich, with the actor in question very obviously based on his former brother in law and former friend Gustaf Gründgens, when a rumour reaches him, as rumours were wont to do among the exiles. Said rumour, which soon turned out to be completely false, was that Gründgens had been arrested and thrown into a concentration camp due to Göring withdrawing his protection. (Gründgens was homosexual and Goebbels couldn't stand him, so the idea was far from ridiculous.) Klaus Mann's immediate reaction to the rumour: angrily stating in his journal it couldn't be true, because if it were what would become of his novel? That's writerly egotism at its finest for you. (He was right, of course; if it had been true, he'd have been screwed. You can't publish a biting J'Accuse about an artist making a deal with the devil in the form of the Nazis to keep his career if said artist goes from someone profitting from the regime to a victim of the regime.)
Mind you, the killers are neither presented as naifs nor as charismatic monsters in the tradition of Hannibal Lecter. At first, they clearly see this New York writer as someone who can be conned into helping them, and the manipulation game between Capote and Smith is mutual, but the balance shifts because Capote is simply better at it, and because Perry Smith comes to rely on his visits emotionally. If he resembles any cinematic predecessors (can't say anything about the film version of In Cold Blood , because I haven't seen it, either), it is indeed Sean Penn's character in Dead Man Walking; one is always torn between feeling appalled and feeling sorry for the guy, but doesn't forget his victims for a moment.
It's an intelligent film which does expect its audience to pay attention and have a some literary and/or cinematic background; Harper Lee as Capote's confidant and research assistant is of course doubly suited to the role of clear-eyed conscience when you are aware what the book she's publishing in the course of the film, To Kill A Mockingbird, is actually about. And when Capote mentions "Marilyn" in one of his cruel but witty party stories, he doesn't helpfully add "Monroe" for the benefit of the audience. And it's a film that makes you want to go out and read, either for the first time or again, those books that have bled into it - In Cold Blood, To Kill a Mockingbird...and those Edgar Allan Poe tales about artists and their muses which don't offer mercy to either party, either.
This reminds me: I haven't gotten around to posting my thoughts on Capote yet, which I saw last Thursday.
Not having read In Cold Blood yet - though I did read Breakfeast at Tiffany's, so I'm not a compete Capote ignoramus - nor the biography this is based on, I do not know how factual or not a movie this is, but it certainly is a stunning film, and Philipp Seymour Hoffman deserves his Oscar completely. But it's more than his fantastic performance that makes this movie worth watching. Let me put it this way: the comparison with Walk The Line is instructive, because Walk The Line is in many ways, especially narratively, a typical biopic, and while it does paint Johnny Cash as a man with flaws (and not just those kind of flaws the audience really sees as virtues), it definitely makes the effort to keep its main subject likeable. Whereas Capote couldn't care less whether you like Truman Capote. It just cares that you feel challenged to watch him during those few years of his life the movie covers - the research and writing of In Cold Blood - and never makes it easy to make up your mind about him.
Another interesting comparison is with an older film, Dead Man Walking. There are some superficial similarities - in both cases, you have the main character starting to visit and forming a bond with a death cell inmate; in both cases, the prisoner is a murderer whose guilt isn't really in doubt though for the most part of the movie he insists he's not really to blame and refuses to talk about the actual crime; in both cases, the prisoner originally starts to talk to the main character because he believes the main character can do something to sway public opinion about him and stop or change his fate; in both cases, a climactic scene takes place between main character and prisoner as the prisoner finally does confess his crime, which is then followed by the main character watching the execution; and of course both films are based on real life events. But the differences are even more blatant. Because Dead Man Walking makes it confession scene about redemption and compassion, and is in fact in many ways one of the most convincing religious movies I've seen (though I guess the fact that it was directed by Tim Robbins and stars Susan Sarandon means it usually doesn't get classified as such). Whereas in Capote, the confession paradoxically settles the doom not of the prisoner (there is never a real question, even if you don't know the historical facts, as to whether these two killers will get executed or not) but of the main character. But then, Capote isn't about guilt and penance and compassion at all. It is, at its heart, a brilliant and twisted take on the story of the artist and his muse.
In one of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, a painter paints his wife; the portrait gets better and better, his wife gets sicker and sicker, but he doesn't really notice (or does he?), and when he has finished the portrait, his wife crumbles, dead. (Poes own wife, of course, like so many of his heroines died of consumption.) So here we have fellow Southerner Truman Capote, reading in the newspaper about a family murdered in Kansas, and seeing this as an opportunity to write a story, and then, once he starts with the serious research, a novel, a new kind of novel, the non-fiction variety. He ingratiates himself with the locals and the investigators, he ingratiates himself with the killers, spends more and more time with one of them, Perry Smith, listening to his stories, and quite soon realizes his book can only have one convincing ending - the execution of both. They believe he's trying to help them; aside from finding them a lawyer early on, he's really not. But at times he'd like to believe so.
At one point, after Capote has already written about two thirds of his book, he tells his childhood friend, Harper Lee, that his lover Jack thinks he (Capote) is exploiting Perry Smith, but also thinks he has fallen in love with him, and adds that it both can't possibly be true. Harper Lee then asks what is, and Capote replies that he has the feeling that he and Perry Smith grew up in the same house, with Smith leaving through the backdoor and Capote through the front door. The beauty of the film lies in the fact that it really doesn't choose any single one of these easy routes. Capote certainly isn't immune to the fact Smith is good looking, but he's not in love (or just plain lust), either; he does exploit him, but he can only manage this by giving a part of himself in the process, and if the quotes from In Cold Blood we hear are anything to go by, the results are breathtaking prose. Once he has all he needs for his story, he tries to shut himself off from the source, and simultanously wills it to die and is horrified by the actual event. True enough to the Poe model, the portrait is painted, the muse dies. And the artist, having lost his muse, is punished for his presumption by the blocking of his talent from the point onwards. Or so the credits inform us by saying Capote never finished another book, and died of alcoholism (another Poe-esque element). It's the ending the story demands, much like the ending the story Capote was writing had to be the death of the killers. Which means it's immaterial whether or not this diagnosis of the reasons for Capote's unfinished books post-In Cold Blood is correct or not; it is right for this film.
It's always tricky to use a visual medium - film - to describe something so interior and, as far as outward motion is concerned, by necessity static as writing. Which is why films about writers often don't work. (Films about painters have it easier by comparison.) However, the research process wgucg due to the fact Capote has to talk with people as opposed to collecting material in libraries is interactive, allows this film to get across something of the utter absorption, fascination and the lack of mercy the writing process can have, via human interactions. I was reminded of something I found in the diaries of Klaus Mann. (Son of Thomas, very talented, very doomed.) He's busy typing away at what was later recognized as his masterpiece, Mephisto, a novel about an actor going from having a career in the Weimar Republic to having an even better career in the Third Reich, with the actor in question very obviously based on his former brother in law and former friend Gustaf Gründgens, when a rumour reaches him, as rumours were wont to do among the exiles. Said rumour, which soon turned out to be completely false, was that Gründgens had been arrested and thrown into a concentration camp due to Göring withdrawing his protection. (Gründgens was homosexual and Goebbels couldn't stand him, so the idea was far from ridiculous.) Klaus Mann's immediate reaction to the rumour: angrily stating in his journal it couldn't be true, because if it were what would become of his novel? That's writerly egotism at its finest for you. (He was right, of course; if it had been true, he'd have been screwed. You can't publish a biting J'Accuse about an artist making a deal with the devil in the form of the Nazis to keep his career if said artist goes from someone profitting from the regime to a victim of the regime.)
Mind you, the killers are neither presented as naifs nor as charismatic monsters in the tradition of Hannibal Lecter. At first, they clearly see this New York writer as someone who can be conned into helping them, and the manipulation game between Capote and Smith is mutual, but the balance shifts because Capote is simply better at it, and because Perry Smith comes to rely on his visits emotionally. If he resembles any cinematic predecessors (can't say anything about the film version of In Cold Blood , because I haven't seen it, either), it is indeed Sean Penn's character in Dead Man Walking; one is always torn between feeling appalled and feeling sorry for the guy, but doesn't forget his victims for a moment.
It's an intelligent film which does expect its audience to pay attention and have a some literary and/or cinematic background; Harper Lee as Capote's confidant and research assistant is of course doubly suited to the role of clear-eyed conscience when you are aware what the book she's publishing in the course of the film, To Kill A Mockingbird, is actually about. And when Capote mentions "Marilyn" in one of his cruel but witty party stories, he doesn't helpfully add "Monroe" for the benefit of the audience. And it's a film that makes you want to go out and read, either for the first time or again, those books that have bled into it - In Cold Blood, To Kill a Mockingbird...and those Edgar Allan Poe tales about artists and their muses which don't offer mercy to either party, either.