CAPOTE (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)

Writer Harlan Ellison, when discussing the moral responsibility of artists, once said, “As a human being, Doestoyesky was a monster but you can’t tell me The Idiot didn’t earn him a place in heaven.”

What to make of author and raconteur Truman Capote? After watching Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s superlative performance in the new film Capote one has to wonder whether the celebrated writer’s true-crime masterpiece, In Cold Blood, referred to the murders it chronicled or the methods he used to get his story.

Director Bennett Miller’s smart and absorbing Capote offers up a discerning character study of the author as a ruthlessly manipulative and obsessively insightful writer. Vain, dishonest, and, at times, surprisingly sincere, Capote is a fascinating figure but far from likeable.

His “nonfiction novel” -- an account of the 1959 murder of the Clutters, a family of four murdered on their isolated Kansas farm -- was arguably the writer's greatest achievement and established the true-crime novel as a new and vital literary genre.

Accompanied by his childhood friend and research assistant, Nell Harper Lee (later to win a Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird), the effete author travels to rural Kansas on assignment from The New Yorker. His investigations quickly grow to unexpected proportions and Capote becomes convinced nothing less than a full-length book will do. Charming, lying and bribing the locals, he worms his way into their lives and gains unlimited access to the killers - Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) – even after they’ve been found guilty.

Over time, Truman forms a not-altogether asexual kinship with Perry, which blossoms into a strange case of co-dependency. Dangling promises of legal help, some of which he reneges on, Capote spends four years manipulating and emotionally bonding with the killer. At one point, he remarks, "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. One day, I went out the front door and he went out the back."

Despite their close relationship, Perry is reluctant to give up details about what happened the night of the killings. Years of playing cat and mouse with the truth take their toll and Truman’s frustrations reveal his singular motive and intent: to finish his book. With the killers’ appeals running out and the day of reckoning at hand, Capote worries that he’ll never uncover the full story.

Films about famous writers tend to be dull affairs, concerned more with personal melodrama than artistic inspiration. Capote stands out in its depiction of the working writer’s manners and method. We see Truman as he cajoles, charms and seduces his subjects into trusting him, knowing full well he’ll eventually betray them in print. Capote’s most heartfelt gestures are revealed to be self-serving, a means to an end. While witnessing Perry’s hanging, his dispassionate gaze unmasks the depths of his insincerity. Soon after he indulges in a bit of emotional hyperbole, lamenting, "There was nothing I could do to save them." To which Harper Lee bluntly replies, "The fact is you didn't want to."

Not enough can be said about Hoffman’s nuanced portrait of this complicated and conflicted narcissist. The actor gets past expert mimicry and disappears completely into his role, fearlessly capturing Capote’s mendacity and self-absorption while honoring the writer’s intelligence and indomitable sense of purposefulness. It’s a performance that will, undoubtedly, be heralded at Oscar time. Chris Cooper delivers yet another dignified and understated performance as the local lawman and Catherine Keener turns in a subdued portrait of Harper Lee.

Though Capote’s narrative structure owes far too much to Dead Man Walking – going so far as to put off the brutality of the murders until the very end -- screenwriter Dan Futterman’s first effort earns praise for its intelligence and restraint. Unfortunately, he fails to find a beating heart in his story and the audience is left with no one to connect with. The film ends up being intellectually satisfying but as emotionally barren as its wintry Kansas landscape.

The crux of Capote’s novel was the eventual toll it took on the author’s psyche. In Cold Blood was the last full-length book Truman ever wrote, as his life succumbed to despair and alcoholism. In his relentless pursuit to embrace the art of writing, the author clearly sacrificed some of his humanity. It is a testament to Hoffman’s abilities as an actor that we can look past Capote’s shameless crocodile tears and coldness of heart and find unexpected poignancy in his emotional and mental erosion. The ultimate irony is that this brilliant man who could see into his subjects with such depth and insight understood so little of himself.