You think you know something…
In 1959, Breakfast At Tiffanys author Truman Capote, on assignment for The New Yorker, would travel to rural Kansas to investigate the slaying of a farm family and the drifters responsible for the massacre.
Faithfully accompanied by Nelle Harper Lee (soon to publish To Kill A Mockingbird), Capote gained unprecedented access to the police investigation and the perpetrators, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith.
Capote would spend the next six years writing In Cold Blood, his coruscating account of the case and most enduring work. Like Norman Mailer’s early literary non-fiction, In Cold Blood would provide a cornerstone for New Journalism and a mandatory read for anyone who would think to put pen to paper.
Directed by Bennett Miller and written by actor Dan Futterman, Capote draws from Gerald Clarke’s biography and Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist And The Murderer to give an account of these crucial six years and a chilling commentary besides.
The resulting film adds an entirely new horror to the text of In Cold Blood, a barbed reminder of Malcolm’s notion that there’s something very wrong with a journalist seeking to morally defend their profession.
It might well be titled In Colder Blood.
As the New Orleans born writer, Phillip Seymour Hoffman marries dazzling impersonation – picture Tex Avery’s Droopy auditioning for one of Tennessee William’s southern baby-belles – with the aspect of a man undergoing trial by fire and a dead-eye callousness.
He takes a shine to one of the killers – the ‘sensitive’ Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), only to return home, thumb through Smith’s diary and excitedly declare he’s stumbled upon ‘a goldmine’.
As the time approaches for Smith and Hickock to face the gallows, they write Truman, pleading for assistance with a last minute legal appeal. By then, he’s far too concerned with finding an appropriate concluding chapter.
“There wasn’t anything I could have done to save them,” he tells Nelle (an impressively dowdy Catherine Keener) seeking her assurances.
“Maybe,” comes the sad response, “but you didn’t want to.”
Deftly distilling enough thematic hooks for a dozen movies, Capote explores the notion of the forgotten cause celebre (previously tackled, albeit clumsily, in Hurricane), forensically details the creative process like no film since Topsy Turvy and underscores with the cynicism of post-classical Hollywood.
Thrilling and fascinating, the film forces a complete reappraisal of the man and his work, yet for all the duplicity and exploitation, Mr. Seymour Hoffman, investing the role with the tragic flawed humanity of a Richard III, can keep us on side.
Somewhere, one suspects, Gore Vidal is smiling front row centre just the same.