• Rating:
Film from 2005, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Oscar winner (in my opinion very well-deserved, kudos to the actor's charisma). This review disregards personal stories, real-life references, and the book from which the film is adapted; it is based solely on the impressions evoked in me by the cinematic work.
The film unfolds at a rather slow pace, one must really want to follow the narrative thread and to understand where it's headed. If you're expecting a film about investigative journalism, you're completely off track. Yes, the story originates from the massacre of an ordinary family in a remote farm of a quiet Kansas community, where terror spreads due to the slaughter performed without apparent reason. But the film's structure relies on the hypertrophic personality of the writer Truman Capote, who, upon reading the news in the papers, initially decides to write an article about the incident, then to turn it into material for a full-fledged book.
There is no investigative thread: almost immediately, two foreign suspects are caught, accused, and sentenced, and they remain imprisoned until the end of the film, waiting for the bureaucratic processes of justice to take their course up to the death penalty. During this time (six years), Capote gets to know the two criminals, forming an ambiguous relationship—at times morbid, at times cruel—with one of them in particular, Perry Smith, himself a two-faced individual: one side a sensitive soul with cultural ambitions and artistic inclinations, the other a mad, uncontrollable bloody monster.
In my opinion, it's Capote's overwhelming personality that makes up the substance of the film: his first appearance is at a party, at the center of an attentive and amused group listening to his lively stories, his sharp jokes, and his affected manners. Throughout the film, the narrative (silent or spoken) about himself overlaps, occupying every corner, every vital space of the film, with the lives of other characters. The portrait is that of a man who only chases himself, in constructing his own image to the world, in displaying himself through every gesture, every act, and every word. Everything he does seems dictated solely by the pursuit of his own goal, whatever it may be at the time (uncovering details about the criminal case, safeguarding his romantic relationship, fueling his creative process), regardless of against whom he acts (his friend, his partner, the prisoner). Capote: excessive, overflowing, egocentric, cloying, spontaneously constructed, vain, brilliant, hypersensitive, ambiguous, and faithful only to himself. That's how I saw him.
Part of the key to understanding his alienating relationship with the prisoner Perry is given by Capote himself when speaking with the friend who initially helps him with the research, namely, that he sees Perry as another self who, after a shared childhood in the same house, with the same premises and the same possibilities, went on his own way, exiting through the back door while he, Capote, exited through the main door.
Then could the evident pain and turmoil on his face at the time of the execution stem from a sincere sense of guilt for not having wanted to save that monstrous other self? Or from the awareness of not being in a more intimate sense as cruel (even towards the people who love him) and as mad (in pursuing only his own muse) as he is? Desperation in witnessing his own self-condemnation or emotion for the tragic (for Perry) and liberating (for his creative work, which finally reaches its conclusion) epilogue? The real question, I would say, is about the conscience and mind of this man, about what this book (his last completed work) represents for him and his life in relation to the incident itself.
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