Capote

Director: Bennett Miller

Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr., Chris Cooper

From director Bennett Miller comes the multi-Oscar nominated biopic whose star won the Best Actor award. Capote is Truman Capote, a highly successful American writer best known for his non-fiction novel “In Cold Blood” and novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. This film follows Capote as he writes the former, the true story of a pair of drifters, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock who broke into a Kansas farmhouse in 1959 believing there was $10,000 stashed there, only to discover it was not true. In a horrific crime the family of four living there were systematically murdered. Intrigued with the story, Capote believes it could render the best book he has ever written and travels to Kansas with childhood friend Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) to investigate. Upon meeting the arrested pair he befriends Perry Smith and strikes up a strange friendship, perhaps even falls in love with him. Sentenced to death Capote sees his friend through life on death row and appeals, but as time goes on he realises he cannot finish his book until the murderers are either freed…or hanged.

This is an outstanding film, with Hoffman stunning in the lead. It is very rare to forget you are watching an actor, but Hoffman becomes Capote; New York’s darling, at once egotistical and utterly talented, cunning and child-like, pained and unaffected. Such an obsessively complete performance is spine-tingling, and yet only the tip of the iceberg for what this film holds. The entire cast is superb; when Hoffman is in danger of stealing every scene, Keener and Collins more than hold their own and add great depth to an already harrowing script, particularly Smith’s murderous but tortured soul.

Although the film just focuses on a short period of Capote’s life it masterfully encompasses a life’s story; his lonely childhood that he says could have left him as screwed up as Perry Smith; both growing up in the same house but one walking out the front door, the other the back, through his meteoric rise to fame and popularity in New York society to an end title card that has him never completing another book. As much as it is a story of his life, Capote is as challenging and moving as “Dead Man Walking” on the subject of the death penalty, and as accomplished as the likes of “Ray” and “Walk The Line” it is in telling the story of a fascinating life, it is so much more, a profound study in human behaviour.

Hannah Upton