Apologies for length of this but I watched Capote on the weekend and thought it was great, very very absorbing and extremely moving. All the performances were a credit to the cast and the look and the feel of the movie was perfect.
I don’t really agree that Capote was pictured out’n’out as some manipulative monster, I think the way that the plot unfurled was much more clever and on the ball than that. Remember that Capote said he wanted to make the killers humans again, rather than the monsters that the media would portray them as – and to that point, within the context of the movie, he was successful, as you found yourself becoming sympathetic towards the killers despite their having committed 4 brutal murders, as you saw Capote use deceit and psychological manipulation to unravel the truth behind what had taken place.
But you also saw the struggles and torment within himself very clearly, and the overlay between the professional writer and his inner person who worried that people had him nailed down as soon as they met him, thus leading to his need to place himself at the centre of events to confound this expectation.
***SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT***
Contrast the two scenes of men crying in the film – first, when Perry begins to finally reveal what happened on the night of the killings, we see a tear run down his cheek as he says that he looked at this nice man and realised that this nice man was scared of him as he thought he was going to kill him, and as a result, Perry felt terrible. However, instead of walking away from the situation, it actually unleashes some demonic surge of violence. It is shown as a disassociative event, and completely at odds with the portrayal of the character to date.
Cut to the scene as Capote meets the killers prior to their execution – again, we see tears, this time from the author, as the grim realisation that this isn’t some semi-fictional narrative that is played out on the pages of a book, but two human lives that are about to be ended. On top of this, even though by this point the 2 characters are more than aware that Capote hasn’t been as straight as he could have been with them, they still want him to come along for their last moments. And it crushes him because he does care about Perry, because he does want to feel that he did his best for them, and because he knows that the professional part of him also took advantage of a situation to write a novel that he hopes will change the way that people write in the future. He cannot disassociate himself from these events, in the way that Perry has done and thus the violence of the execution hits him (and you) like a bullet in the head.
The coda of the call from Harper Lee, and the final epitaph re: unanswered prayers, strongly imply his moral dilemmas and mixed-up confusion continuing long after the events portayed – I feel it is far too simplistic to point the finger at Capote as some evil or mendacious man, without digging a bit more into what has gone before. Simply brilliant stuff, well worth viewing.
