Capote

I had the pleasure recently of watching the film Capote with the Academy Award-winning performance of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. (I should explain that I'm usually about five years or more behind in watching movies. The last one I saw in a theatre was The Simpsons Movie.)

Capote is based on the period in the author's life in which he was writing his crime novel In Cold Blood, an account of the murder of four members of a Kansas family in 1959.

Hoffman's exceptional, nuanced performance allows us to see the conflict between Capote the writer, wanting only to focus on the story, and Capote the human being, who develops a relationship with one of the killers, seeing in him a kindred spirit in their strong sense of abandonment as children.

Capote's real-life friend Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, serves as his conscience in the film. After the two men are executed, Capote tries to reassure himself that he has done everything in his power to obtain the best legal representation for them. However, Lee observes that in fact Capote has always wanted the appeal process to end and the killers to be executed so he can write the final chapters of his book.

After watching the movie, I found a recording of Truman Capote reading one of his short stories. It's amazing how Hoffman, the consummate character actor, was able to reproduce Capote's speech patterns: http://www.mprnews.org/story/2009/12/....

I haven't read In Cold Blood, but I've ordered the book so I can see firsthand what Capote struggled for four years to write.