|
|
 |
| |
The Truman show
CAPOTE Directed by Bennett MIller
Certificate 12A
FOR those fans of Philip Seymour Hoffman, for those of us
who loved him in Love Liza, Cold Mountain, Magnolia and Boogie
Nights, comes a tour de force that finally gives Hoffman a leading
role of a lifetime.
Starring as the celebrated America writer Truman Capote,
he quite simply disappears into the role of being the author
in his most famous and ultimately most destructive endeavour.
In 1959, Capote was a celebrated author who was also very ambitious,
wanting to change the nature of the American novel, if not the
novel itself. Having won over New York critics, he sets about
looking for a new form of novel – the ‘non-fiction
novel’.
This would be, as he saw it, a way to write the truth about
an event while also darning in the influence of fiction and
the writer’s perception of the event. Nosing through newspaper
cuttings one day, Capote chanced upon a murder in the rural
state of Kansas. The Clutter family were brutally gunned down
in their own beds by two young men, Perry Smith and Richard
Hickock (here played by Clifton Collins Jr and Mark Pelligrino).
The accused were still awaiting sentencing when Capote got involved.
The book which came from his involvement with the men and the
murder, ‘In Cold Blood’, is the novel for which Capote
is deservedly known. But this film is magnificent in showing
the cost of making this work of art – the cost from the
artist himself in moral terms. And moral terms have never been
as earth-shattering as they are here, with Hoffman in the driving
seat as the intellectual oversensitive and vain Capote.
In scene after scene, one little gesture – a flick of a
coattail, an over emphasized word, a lisp or stammer –
brings home not only the flavour of Capote but also the sheer
skill that Hoffman has brought to this role.
As a man who needs to feed on other men’s troubles in order
to bring his own dream and his own ambitions to light, Hoffman
portrays the literary master as alternatively vain and cold
but also vulnerable to influence and flattery. This film screams
Oscar! |
|
|
|
