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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us November 23, 2005 ‘Capote’ has oscar winner written all over it By Chris Honoré Tidings Reviewer “Capote” is a remarkable movie. A stunner, really, due in great part to the tour de force performance of Philip Seymore Hoffman, who portrays Capote. Hoffman transforms himself to a degree that is rarely seen on screen wherein an actor inhabits the character to such a degree that after the first few frames the fact that we are not watching Capote is quickly forgotten, so good is Hoffman. This is no small thing. Capote was an elfin man, fey and effete, a doyen of Upper East Side cocktail parties, intensely delighted when surrounded by a small audience hanging on his every word. He was also a gifted writer who wrote screenplays, books, and was one of the New Yorker magazine's rising stars when, in November of 1959, he spotted an article in the New York Times. It was a short news story about a Holcomb, Kansas farm family that had been brutally shotgunned in their home. He called his editor at the New Yorker and arranged, along with Harper Lee, his research assistant, to go to Holcomb and write about the murders. Here is how Capote, in his book “In Cold Blood” describes Holcomb, Kansas: “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ ... The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.” It is to this stark place that Capote and Lee arrive, and it is where this exceptional film begins. The screen fills with a wide shot of a flat, remote place, the isolation and the silence wonderfully conveyed. We see Capote, wrapped in camel hair overcoat, a heavy scarf wrapped around his neck, enter the local police station and announce that he has arrived from New York, as if there could be any doubt, and is interested in writing about the farm family, the Clutters, who were killed just days before. He is not interested in the men who are the focus of a nationwide manhunt. That will soon change. What the film captures with both insight and force is how Capote begins to sense that he has before him more than a short piece for the magazine; rather, he has found a story of startling possibilities. He's going to write a book, he tells his editor. A groundbreaking work that will merge his abilities as a fiction writer with nonfiction, a genre that he regards as dry and devoid of life. “Truman had long maintained,” writes Gerald Clarke in “Capote: A Biography,” “that nonfiction could be both artful and as compelling as fiction. Only a writer, completely in control of fictional techniques could elevate it to the status of art.” Capote was about to write something extraordinary. He would tell the story of how two men, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, raced across the Kansas plains to a white two-story farm house, and to a destiny that was, at least initially, inexplicable. Capote is drawn into what will become for him a morality play, one in which he is confronted with a personal and professional dilemma that will ravage his conscience and will reveal more of himself than he ever wanted to see. The essence of that dilemma — what Capote does and does not do regarding Smith and Hickock, who are condemned to death by hanging — is the center of this film. What we learn about Capote is, in great part, decidedly unflattering and in the end reprehensible. So good is this film, so tightly written — at moments spare and economical, at others rich and evocative — and so well cast and acted, that it will astonish. The performances, not only by Hoffman, but by Catherine Keener as Harper Lee, Chris Cooper as Alvin Dewey, a Kansas Bureau of Investigation officer, and Clifton Collins portraying Smith, are, to a person, superb. “Capote” has Oscar written all over it and is a film not to be missed. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Harry is plagued by a horrible vision — Lord Voldemort and his familiars out for murder. meanwhile, Hogwarts is prepping for the Quidditch World Cup, and the Yule Ball is approaching. 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