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Amos Lassen wrote on 02/10/2011:

“Capote”
True to Tru--Outstanding Acting
Amos Lassen
There are few words that can fully describe Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance in “Capote”. He had the man down pat; from the walk, the talk, the look and within this he gave the performance of a lifetime. He is the bon vivant who is indulged by friends and lovers; he was connected to the rich and the famous. Suddenly he becomes penetrating as he probes the human condition. He the uses his cynicism to get what he wants and exhibits sincere emotion which he used for his purposes. He is cruel when he feels indignation for the sociopath that murdered the Clutter family and then became his muse. He is ambitious with the goal to do something great and the cost is high. With that, he is still a sympathetic character.
Capote, himself, was a character, and Hoffman develops that for us to see. Opposite Hoffman is Catherine Keener as Nelle (Harper Lee) and she is also perfect. She is warm and caring, perceptive and honest.
Together they are the ideal team. With acting like this, the plot almost seems unnecessary but it too is almost flawless. The cinematography evokes the past in its measured beauty and consistent, confident editing.
Watching “Capote” you are sure that you are watching a precious moment of film history. It is a movie that keeps getting better and better with subsequent viewings.
Those of us that were fortunate to have met Capote sat in awe of Hoffman’s performance—it was as if Tru never died. But the movie contains a great deal of truth as it shows the tragedy of a man who discarded his own decency in order to write one of the great American works of literature. As he achieves greatness, he is also damned. Capote’ contempt for the death penalty for a man who was abominable stabs at us and shows us that inhumanity is not always physically violent.
“Capote” has great assets—the best performance by an American actor in a very long time and some of the most intelligent dialog in recent years. However the movie is misleading. You would think by the title that it is about the life of the author. It is, rather, about the great novel that he wrote and his transformation from wunderkind and jet-setter to a trend-setting talented writer.
The film itself contains no excitement and the courtroom scenes tend to be quite boring but it does show great thought and intelligence with acting superiority.
The movie opens with a ghastly recreation of the crime that caused Capote to write “In Cold Blood”. When the scene shifts to New York City and we see Hoffman for the first time as Capote we feel like we are seeing a ghost. As we watch Hoffman, Capote becomes larger than life. In his flamboyance, he is amazing but as he transitions into an investigative author and we go with him, it is if we are now part of each other.
The Clutter murders were and still are extremely unsettling as is the movie. Hoffman has something of which to be very proud and we have a great American movie.

Gay Movie Viewer (jamesvmorris@verizon.net) wrote on 01/06/2006:

Movie audiences have always loved movies about movies. And even more so, movies about very popular movies. Capote is a movie about the writing of a book that became a very popular movie. The critics certainly loved both Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as the tortured novelist and the movie Capote; it’s just a question of time before we know how popular this film turns out to be with audiences. As far as I am concerned, Capote is the first major DVD release of 2006.

"In Cold Blood" has long been considered one of the most realistic crime dramas ever filmed, and a high-point of 1960’s cinema, mostly for its documentary style. In the film Capote,/I>, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote mentions that In Cold Blood represented a new type of literary accomplishment, a work based on fact presented in the style of narrative fiction. Capote himself said that the book was meant to re-define non-fiction, and in fact, it did. Many writers have since copied the style pioneered by Capote in the book "In Cold Blood".

The film tells the story of the writing of the book, and how it led to Capote’s artistic downfall, despite its overwhelming success. The film makes it clear that Capote was emotionally involved with one of the killers, but not enough to prevent himself from lying and manipulating the condemned and doomed men to get what he wanted. It also details the cold emotionless manner in which Capote divorces himself from his feelings and his conscience in order to develop his book, deceiving the killers into believing that their cooperation would somehow lead to their lives being spared, if not their actual exoneration. In the process, Capote loses track of his own moral compass, yet was profoundly affected by his intense involvement with the two killers. In order to gain their trust, Capote had to develop a friendship with the killers, and in fact, his friendship with Perry Smith (played by Clifton Collins Jr.) borders on obsession. We are never quite sure throughout the film exactly what is going on inside Capote’s head; at times his interest in the killer’s welfare appears quite genuine, at other points it appears that he is using them solely for the sake of getting a good book out of it. Whatever his precise feelings, he suffered for his involvement – a post script to the film reminds us that "In Cold Blood" was the last piece of work that Capote ever finished. Following the book’s completion, he began a downhill progression into alcohol addiction that he never overcame. The film does not dwell on Capote’s sexuality; although his male partner is included in several scenes, their relationship is never explored or physically represented, and his homosexuality is given a matter-of-fact but unobtrusive handling. As a gay man I had no problem with this, since sexual orientation was rarely discussed publicly in the early 1960’s.

Some of the scenes from the original film "In Cold Blood" are recreated in Capote. These are done so skillfully that, aside from the fact that the original was filmed in black and white, you can scarcely tell the difference. The scene towards the end when the killers are finally executed so closely resembles the original film that you almost think it was lifted directly from it.

On the whole, Capote is dramatically satisfying and extremely entertaining. Coupled with the extraordinary performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman, it emerges as a near perfect motion picture.