CAPOTE

Scott Fitzgerald famously declared that there are no second acts in American lives. Truman Capote was an exception. At 21, Random House gave him a contract for his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms.  It created a sensation, as much for Truman's jacket photo, a pretty, blond boy reclining on a sofa, gazing languidly at the camera. By the time he was 30 he had published The Grass Harp, A Tree of Night , Breakfast at Tiffany's, and written the hilariously funny and still underrated screenplay for John Huston's Beat the Devil. Impressive as his first act was, Capote wanted to write something more significant. Two months after turning 35 and perhaps wondering if half his life were over, he read a story in The New York Times about the brutal murder in western Kansas of a respected, well-off farming family, the Clutters: father, mother, and their teen-age son and daughter were shot and their throats cut; the unknown criminals had gotten away. As if he were asking, Death, where is thy sting?  Truman decided to go to Kansas and write about how the murders affected the community.   After publishing his The Muses Are Heard, New Yorker editor William Shawn agreed to send him, along with his pal Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), who would act as his research assistant and bodyguard. Truman spent the next six years interviewing, researching, and writing before he published In Cold Blood , the story of the community, the crime, the criminals, and of Capote himself. The making of this American writer's second act is the subject of Capote, Bennett Miller's remarkable film.

Miller has done almost everything right, starting with Dan Futterman's screenplay, which condenses but never oversimplifies a complex story and characters.  Adam Kimmel's cinematography captures the bleak Kansas landscape and the bleak jail cells, without romanticizing either. When at the start, there is an abrupt transition from Manhattan's skyscrapers to tall Kansas wheat, you know the editor, Christopher Tellefsen, understands ideas as well as images. Filmmakers and actors have made a movie of originality, literacy, and beauty.

Capote's life has become so well known that little back story is needed.  He was born in New Orleans in 1924; his parents were divorced before Truman turned six, and he lived with his mother, an alcoholic who often left him alone when she went on dates. Truman began inventing stories and writing them down. At 12, he was adopted by his mother's new husband, Joseph Capote, a broker who could afford an apartment on Park Avenue and a house in Greenwich, Conn., where Truman went to high school. He never graduated. Continuing to write, Truman published stories in Mademoiselle and  Harper's Bazaar.  The magazine he most wanted to appear in was The New Yorker, where he could only get a job as a copy boy. Brendan Gill, an editor and contributor, called young Truman "a gorgeous apparition, fluttering, flitting up and down the corridors of the magazine." Truman made no attempt to conceal his homosexuality, and anyone who remembers his frequent TV guest appearances in the 60s and 70s recalls his flamboyant mannerisms and high-pitched voice. This is the Truman who ingratiated himself into the farming community of Holcomb, Kansas, became intimate friends of the killers, and whom Philip Seymour Hoffman incarnates in Capote.  Hoffman's performance is no impersonation, but a recreation.  His Capote is a calculating, aggressively charming entrepreneur whose business is writing a book.   And anybody dumb enough to stand in his way gets run over.

When Capote arrives in the brown and gray Kansas town it's November, and he is wrapped in a scarf of many colors that attracts no little attention. "Bergdorf's," he explains. Not to be upstaged by this apparition, Alvin Dewey, the chief police investigator, played by Chris Cooper with the taciturn stolidity of a Mount Rushmore head, points to his brown hat. "Sears," he says. Dewey and Capote are impressed by each other's professionalism, and when the killers are caught Dewey permits Truman to interview them.   Truman treats Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) and Perry Smith like human beings and soon has their confidence, especially Perry's. It's Perry that Truman becomes close to. Confined to cells, Perry is played by Clifton Collins, Jr.; mostly acting with voice and eyes, Collins brilliantly portrays a killer in an understated and sympathetic way. An attractive young man, Perry comes from a broken home, writes persuasive letters, draws good pictures, including a portrait of Truman, and speaks intelligently. It's no surprise that he and Truman flirt with each other and form a bond that lasts till Perry is executed and after.  The bond between them is clear in two almost wordless scenes. The first is on death row: Perry tries starving himself to death because his appeals keep getting turned down. Capote goes to a grocery, buys mashed banana baby food and spoons it into Perry's mouth, persuading him not to kill himself. He still needs Perry's own account of what actually happened the night of the murder for In Cold Blood. And Perry tells him the bloody story, for good measure adding that he and Richard netted less than $60 from the Clutters.

Capote needs more than an anecdote, he needs an ending for his book, and realizes that a successful appeal based on insanity would be no climax at all, certainly nothing to balance the enormity of the actual crime. The only appropriate ending would be the killers' execution. After first finding lawyers to file successfully for stays, Capote realizes that further appeals will delay his book and perhaps spoil it. He tells Dick and Perry he could not find a lawyer, and goes to Leavenworth to attend their hanging. There's little doubt that their crime is properly punished, but so is Capote. In a second scene that's both touching and horrifying, he spoons banana baby food from a jar into his own mouth and washes it down with a scotch. In Cold Blood  has been his second act in American life.   He is famous and rich; his Black and White costume ball at the Plaza, "the party of the century," cemented for a time his place in what was left of the New York Society he aspired to. He told everyone his next book would be another nonfiction novel, Answered Prayers. The title is from the old saying that more unhappiness comes from prayers that come true than from those unanswered.  But by then Capote had become a drunk, and writing so openly about his famous friends made them despise and drop him.  Answered Prayers was as celebrated a personal and literary disaster as In Cold Blood  had been a success. He never finished another book. There was no third act.

As Oscar Wilde observed, "There are two tragedies in life, not to get what you want and to get it." Capote  brilliantly embodies both tragedies in the same person and the same story.

                                    John L. Hochmann