Capote

I saw Capote this weekend. It's not the kind of movie I'd walk away saying "I loved that!" but it was one of the best and most challenging movies I've seen in a long time. Besides being well-done, and besides Philip Seymour Hoffman's mind-bogglingly good performance, it's a writer's movie, and I'm always a sucker for writer's movies.

The movie tells about the writing of the first "nonfiction novel," a murder story called In Cold Blood. What begins as Capote's intent to write an article about the murderers blossoms into a whole book, one whose research he becomes almost obsessed with. To get information from the killers, he crafts a phony relationship with them, even straight-up lies to them about his intentions. He tricks them into believing that he's going to write something that will redeem their memories, portray them as sympathetic and human, and prevent the world from forever viewing them as monsters. When their time on death row has elapsed and Capote hasn't gotten all he needs to know, he hires them a superstar lawyer who gets their execution stayed again and again, for years, while Capote plays them for information. One of the killers keeps asking the title of the book, and Capote keeps brushing it off by saying he hasn't thought of one yet. When he finally has completed all his research, and the killers' appeals are going all the way to the Supreme Court, he nearly has a nervous breakdown at the idea that their death sentence may be overturned and he won't have a good ending for his book. He used two people in order to turn them into characters in what he knew was going to be one of the biggest books of the twentieth century.

I call the movie challenging because there are serious moral implications in that, aren't there? I don't think Capote ever believed the killers were anything other than monsters; he just flat-out played them so they'd open up to him. Yes, he was upset when they were finally killed, but I would argue that was because, by then, they were his characters, no longer people, and every writer loves his characters.

I also found the movie disturbing because even in the ethically-ambigous parts where Capote came across as almost villainous, I know I would've done the exact same thing. Truman Capote had more talent in a clipped fingernail than I have in my whole body, obviously, but still I understand his desire to get down a good story at all costs, to manipulate reality into a better book. How many times in college did I initate final conversations or confrontations just because I needed an ending for a particular friendship or dating storyline in my journal? Numerous. It's a weird thing, when events become not events but pre-written literature. Capote didn't change what happened -- he didn't change the crime -- but he kept the killers alive for three years longer than they were supposed to be, just so he could get a good ending out of them. Take that, James Frey.