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Some films seem made of shadow and frost, Capote is one of them. A sober, dark, controlled film. It has an austere elegance that may seem superficial and that has fascinated the audience and critics, but beneath the surface, one senses something disturbing, that dark side of the human being that is uncomfortable to confront.
November 1959: in the heart of Kansas, a house empties of life on a winter’s night: the Clutter family is wiped out, and the echo of that massacre travels to New York, where Truman Capote – an established writer, an intelligent but vain intellectual, and a champion of social life – reads a small newspaper column and sniffs an opportunity: to transform horror into literature. A masterpiece, possibly. But also a new stage.
He leaves for the Midwest with Nelle Harper Lee – the quiet childhood friend about to write To Kill a Mockingbird. And from there begins a descent into darkness: interviews, cordial smiles, closed doors, until the meeting with the two murderers. One of them, Perry Smith, clings to him like a stain difficult to wash away.
Capote is fascinated. Perhaps in love. Certainly, very inspired. Perry is everything Truman is not: unstable, brutal, unfiltered. And at the same time, they are two sides of the same tragedy: childhood marked by abandonment, alcoholic mothers, absent fathers, misdirected intelligence. Only one found literature, the other violence.
Capote oscillates between affection and calculation, between affectionate gestures and cold manipulations. He sends gifts, writes emotional letters, but in the meantime takes notes. He waits for his protagonists to be sentenced to death to finish the book. This is the prelude to the author's crisis, who cannot complete the work until the characters disappear from the scene. Literally.
Philip Seymour Hoffman has transformed into Capote: the voice, the tics, the gestures, a fragile but sharp presence. He is a Truman Capote truer than true. And, for once, the Oscar is not given randomly or for “political” reasons but for an impeccable interpretation.
Bennett Miller’s direction never seeks to seduce: it accompanies, observes, leaves space for silence. And in silence, everything amplifies. The photography is cold and claustrophobic. The soundtrack does not console: it underscores the void.
The film, icy and melancholic, is the chronicle of a moral compromise, the anatomy of a brilliant soul that consciously chooses to become a monster just to write his masterpiece.
Available on Prime Video. Watch it when you’re in the mood for something beautiful, but not comforting.
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Side note: the original title is Capote, adapted for the Italian audience who is probably unfamiliar with the author.
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Other reviews
By uxo
Capote: excessive, overflowing, egocentric, cloying, spontaneously constructed, vain, brilliant, hypersensitive, ambiguous, and faithful only to himself.
The film's structure relies on the hypertrophic personality of the writer Truman Capote...everything he does seems dictated solely by the pursuit of his own goal.
