| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Reviews

Capote. Dir. by Bennett Miller. Prod. by Caroline Baron, Michael Ohoven, and William Vince. Infinity Features, United Artists, and Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. 114 mins.
This expertly crafted and thought-provoking film is based on Gerald Clarke's well-respected 1988 biography of the writer Truman Capote (Capote), who was one of the foremost literary celebrities of the 1950s and 1960s. Not following the pattern of a conventional biopic, Miller and the screenwriter Dan Futterman focus on a particularly important period in Capote's life: the five years during which he researched and wrote the seminal "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood (1965), making him perhaps the most famous writer of the era. As Miller and Futterman demonstrate, that achievement exacted a toll on Capote from which he never completely recovered, and their mesmerizing film enables us to see him struggle with, and ultimately succumb to, the inner demons that producing the book aroused.	1
The film opens in the aftermath of the incident that inspired the book, the brutal murder of a Holcomb, Kansas, family by two drifters in November 1959. Reading about the crime in the New York Times, Capote convinces William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, to send him there to write a piece on how the killings were impacting the community. Accompanied by fellow writer Harper Lee, a childhood friend who would soon became famous for writing To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Capote gradually wins the trust of several important people, including the local sheriff leading the investigation. His research takes a new turn when the killers are apprehended, and he is allowed to interview them. Recognizing the gold mine of material now within reach, he decides that he will write not just a magazine article but an entire book.	. . .

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