Common Sense Note
Parents should know that the movie concerns Truman Capote's research into multiple murders in Kansas, 1959, for his book In Cold Blood. It includes images of bloody bodies, crime scene photos, discussions of the means of killing (knife and shotgun), allusions to rape and racist assumptions (before the killers are caught, someone suggests "Mexicans" committed the crime). Characters drink and smoke, at parties, at home, and alone. Capote is flamboyantly gay, discusses gay relationships, discusses sex (including a phone conversation with friend/writer James Baldwin, with references to interracial, interfaith sex), and some cursing (one use of the f-word). Capote tells a story about hearing of his mother's death
Families can discuss the question of journalistic ethics. How does Capote develop and then betray a trust with Perry? How does the film make their shared sympathy -- as "outsiders" at once sympathetic and dangerous? How does the movie present the death penalty, as punishment, justice, revenge, and/or object of media sensationalism?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Title notwithstanding, CAPOTE is not precisely a portrait of Truman Capote. It's more the story of a cultural shift, embodied and perhaps even advanced by Capote (here played by Philip Seymour Hoffman). This shift toward self-involved and self-serving journalism, world-shaping as it can be, finds a brilliant new form in Capote's work. A much lauded novelist by the time the film starts in 1959, he's also restless, perhaps looking for trouble. He finds it in Kansas.
CAPOTE's opening images show the crime scene that will draw Capote's attention, a lonely farmhouse where the Clutters have been butchered. Capote's research, undertaken with the assistance of his friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), initiates a relationship with Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper).
Meticulous and self-conscious, Capote is ever aware of the way his scarf is arranged on his neck, even as he attends to details of corpses and crime scene photos. "It comforts me, something so horrifying," he says after he sees the bodies, "Normal life falls away. I was never much for normal life." His eerie intuition concerning the significance of particulars (he notes the way a killer has turned or covered a face, imagines novelistic motives) vaguely impresses Dewey, who thought he'd seen it all before this case, but Capote is more in love with his talent than any admirer could be. Plying one young interview subject, he caters to her desire for affirmation: "It's hard when someone has a notion about you and it's impossible to convince them otherwise. Ever since I was a child, people thought they had me pegged because of the way I am, the way I talk." But, he says, his voice lilting defiantly, "They were always wrong."
And yet, according to the movie, directed by Bennett Miller and adapted from Gerald Clarke's book by Dan Futterman, Capote is pretty much undone by this experience. A closing note reveals that following the publication of In Cold Blood, the so-called first "nonfiction novel," published six years after Capote begins his work on the New Yorker piece, Capote became a superstar and never wrote another book. Instead, he essentially drank himself to death, at 59.
Apparently, this sad end begins in Capote's creepy relationship with his protagonists, the murderers Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino). He develops a not-so-long distance relationship with Perry especially, as they develop something like mutual crushes, Perry being exceptionally rough trade, despite Capote's romantic notion that they are alike. "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house," he tells Lee. And one day, he got up and went out the back door, and I went out the front."
Capote's self-delusion drives the movie, which reshapes his ambition as a kind of psychic vampirism. He has a story in mind, a shape for his climax, and he's only waiting for it to proceed as he knows it will. Lee sees through Capote's posturing, as does his extremely low-key lover Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood). The film allows glimpses of Capote's struggles with the dilemmas before him -- he self-medicates, resists responsibility for the emotional havoc he's wreaking, won't take Perry's collect calls, and argues with Jack.
Still, he seeks salvation -- or sustained celebrity -- in his dazzling new book. "If I leave here without understanding you," he tells Perry during one of their last meetings, "the world will see you as a monster. I don't want that." But what Capote wants is his story, understanding filtered through his own genius. That story reveals the dangers of journalism in search of authenticity and based in intimacy. It also reveals the monster Capote sees in himself -- or more accurately, the monster the movie sees him seeing.
Families who enjoy this movie might also like In Cold Blood (the 1967 film based on Capote's book) or Kinsey (another recent filmic biography).
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Sexual ContentSexual references, mostly verbal, with regard to Capote's steady boyfriend and his crush on one of his interview subjects; some sexual slang. |
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ViolenceImages of dead bodies, discussions of murders, crime scene photos. |
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LanguageAt least one f-word; some mild cursing. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoSmoking, drinking. |
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