Nicky Charlish
posted 23 March 2006

The writer who'll do anything for a good story is an old theme this film's not afraid to tackle anew. It's one about which it's easy to work up a satisfying feeling of righteous indignation. But how much enlightenment does this film provide about the matter?

It starts in 1959 when the Clutter family are found murdered in their remote Kansas farmhouse. Reading about this in the papers, successful novelist and socialite Truman Capote (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) thinks it would be good material for an article for the New Yorker magazine. Accompanied by childhood friend Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener) - herself soon to be come famous for her novel To Kill A Mockingbird - Capote sets off for the Midwest to investigate.

Finding that the subject matter merits a book rather than a feature, Capote - aided by Lee, who acts as a tactful mediator between writer and the locals - sets about collecting copy. The diminutive novelist is shown as duplicitous - but retaining a smug superiority - as he sucks up to the police, local community members and, when the murder suspects have been caught, prison authorities and the suspects themselves. His book - entitled In Cold Blood - takes shape, but he starts to crack up under the pressure of uncertainty. He can't complete the book until the prisoners are executed. Capote, having posed as their friend to get their side of the story, withholds the legal help that might spare them the gallows. They swing, and In Cold Blood (1965) can at last be published.

But, as the film reminds us, Capote never completed another full-length book. Was this due to guilt? Did he get his just desserts? We're left wondering. Given the obstructions he faced as an outsider, was Capote justified - the final denial of legal help for the two condemned men apart - in resorting to underhand methods in getting his story? Harper Lee and Capote's lover Jack Dunphy (played by Bruce Greenwood) deplore his lack of scruples, but only Alvin Dewey (played by Chris Cooper), the case supervisor from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, and one or two locals come out of the story with unalloyed decency. It's difficult to condemn the methods Capote uses with most of the people he encounters.

Director Bennett Miller is careful not to lay on his message too heavily. He makes us speculate. Incidental imagery is used sparingly yet powerfully: a few scenes of jazz-filled cocktail parties summon up a sophisticated New York on the cusp of the sixties that was a distant memory long before 9/11; a couple of glances from a hotel clerk at the camel-hair coat worn by Capote establish the culture clash between urbane Manhattan and the folksy-fierce Midwest the novelist will have to straddle to get his story; and an express train speeding almost invisibly across the skyline contrasts with - and emphasises - the vast expanse of the Midwest in which the bleak story is nurtured.

This is not the first time that the image of a scribbler who'll sacrifice everything - even human life - to get a story has been examined on the big screen. Billy Wilder did so memorably in 1951 with his film Ace In The Hole. Miller's film deserves to take its place, along with Wilder's, as part of cinema's contribution to the debate about how far an author should go in pursuit of a story. But let's not forget that this unsparingly brutal dissection of the matter couldn't have been made without In Cold Blood, its author, and the crime that started it all.