Truman Capote, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, was a troubled man and a famous author. The movie, “Capote”, is a not biography of him, although it does reveal many details about his life. Instead it is a movie about the events that led to Capote writing his most famous novel, “In Cold Blood,” and his relationship with a death row inmate whom he fell in love with.
In the movie, Capote is charismatic, funny and witty, but the movie is strange and dark, and later on into the film, he is revealed to be dark and misunderstood himself.
The plot is about Capote writing a novel, based on the murders of a wealthy farm family by two men. The men are apprehended, put on trial, and then sentenced to death. While they are on death row, Capote comes to visit one of the men, Perry Smith, played by Clifton Collins Jr.
Capote immediately falls in love with him, maybe even at first sight, and wants to know his side of the story so he can put it in his book. Perry, however, is reluctant to give him the details. I’m not going to give any more about the movie away, because I might misinterpret something, and I think you should watch the movie yourself.
To summarize it, I would say that the movie is about Capote’s experiment to find beauty within a monster. It seems every character in the movie with the exception of Capote believed that the men were no more than cold-blooded killers, and maybe it was only because he fell in love with one of them that he thought there could be something else.
This movie had no seams, no glitches, or clichÇs as far as my knowledge of films go. There wasn’t a part in it where I pulled myself out of it and tried to examine it.
As far as production and screenplay goes, the movie is fantastic, and it leaves you trying to grasp for your own opinion, because it doesn’t give you a clear one. It just gives you a small segment of Capote’s life.