Capote, directed by Bennett Miller, is a biography of two persons and a book. The film is based on the biography Capote by Gerald Clarke (1988). The two persons are Truman Capote (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Perry Smith (played by Clifton Collins, Jr.), who, with an accomplice, killed on the night of November 14, 1959, four members of a family living peacefully in a house at a Holcomb, Kansas, a small town some sixty miles west of Dodge City. The book is In Cold Blood (1966), which novelist Capote in the film claims is the first nonfiction novel, thus establishing a new genre that his publisher says "will change the way people write." The three elements converge when Capote reads a newspaper account of the murders, takes a train to Kansas, and talks to Perry, who is incarcerated temporarily in the house of police chief Alvin Dewey (played by Chris Cooper). Capote, who has been searching for a subject for his next novel, believes that the Holcomb massacre can serve as the plot for his masterpiece, and he gets financing from his publisher, New Yorker editor William Shawn (played by Bob Balaban). The film demonstrates how Capote, despite his squeaky voice and swishy appearance, is able to research his subject and distill what he finds into chapters of his award-winning novel. He is accompanied on his first trip to Holcomb by Nelle Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener), author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), whose more conventional demeanor opens doors in Holcomb so that Capote can obtain the local color needed to frame his descriptive narrative. Openly gay, what first attracts Capote to his subject is the gentle exterior of muscular Perry; though unaware that he attracts Capote sexually, Perry rewards Capote at one point with the only physical contact between the two--a hug on learning of a stay of execution arranged by an attorney hired by Capote. The reason for Perry's acceptance of Capote's interest goes beyond the latter's concern about his railroaded trial, in which an incompetent public defender allows the defendants to waive their rights to a preliminary hearing, does not counsel them to plead guilt by insanity, and allows a charge of first degree murder despite the obvious unplanned nature of the offense. What amazes Perry is that the two men, surprisingly, have similar backgrounds. As Capote says at one point, "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. One day, I went out the front door and he went out the back." Both were fatherless, treated as baggage by their mothers, who eventually dumped them. Whereas Capote had the good fortune of being brought up by an aunt in Alabama (the Fruitcake Lady who performed on Jay Leno's Tonight Show), Perry endured orphanages. But Capote was white. Perry's mother was Cherokee. As Capote talks about himself while a visitor in prison, Perry opens up about himself, and the two bond as brothers. However, the novel is incomplete until Capote can learn exactly what happened on that fateful night, and Perry will not tell him as long as his case is on appeal. All Capote knows from the public record is that the two murderers were acting on a false tip that the family had $10,000 in cash in their house but only netted $50 from the robbery, and he has seen police photographs and the faces of the victims in the morgue. When they are on death row, and their final appeal is denied (Capote will not furnish a higher-priced lawyer because he wants to end his book), Capote finally extracts the grisly details of the senseless quadruple murder, which is much more briefly reenacted on the screen in Capote than in the film In Cold Blood (1967). A solemn witness to Perry's hanging on April 14, 1965, Capote is increasingly distraught about the subject of his novel even before that unhappy event. Titles at the end reveal that Capote never wrote another novel and died in 1984 at the age of sixty. (Although the film suggests that alcoholism was the cause of death, some believe that he instead died of a drug overdose.) In addition to the main plot, the film is an exposé of the incompetence of public defenders, the way in which the criminal justice system treats poor indigents as expendable, and most of all provides a window into the mind of an unfortunate castaway who believes that he has been condemned by society to scavenge for money in order to survive.  MH

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Capote: A Biography
by Gerald Clark

Clarke breaks Capote's life into four sections: a childhood spent mostly with relatives while his self-absorbed parents staggered through their disorderly lives; his years of discovery, when he had the two great romances of his life, traveled the world, and found his voice as a writer; the writing of In Cold Blood ; and the destructive obsessions with drugs, alcohol, and lovers that followed.