Still reeling from the awful news of Philip Seymour Hoffman's death. Unbelievably sad. I thought of the only time I was able to interview him, for Vue Weekly, back in 2005, about Capote, the film for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor. That was before this blog, so I'd never posted the piece before. One small way of remembering this wonderful, prolific, singular actor. Apropos of the film's subject, we wound up talking about death.
In Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, his spell-binding account of
a
senseless murder in a rural community and its aftermath, no single
figure
touched by the events, however briefly, passes through without
some
significant establishment of character; no detail regarding the
actions,
ideas, feelings or even dreams of the people featured in these pages
seem
beyond the author’s narrative reach. The crystalline detail and flights
of
poetry of In Cold Blood are so rich as to truly substantiate
Capote’s
identifying the book a “non-fiction novel.” Yet
something conspicuously absent
from the book is Capote himself, who exists
only as our phantom guide, netting
the dense psychological trauma surrounding
these murders without leaving so
much as a fingerprint in his wake.
Bennett Miller’s Capote, in its evocatively
compact, largely visual way, also
vibrates with novelistic detail, its
austere framing of the Kansas countryside
where the Clutter family met their
deaths (recalling Bergman’s Winter Light)
and the gestures it captures
from its players (especially Chris Cooper and
Clifton Collins Jr.) tell us
volumes about the grief, isolation, anger and
trust that haunts the
characters with impressive economy. Yet here, Capote is
no phantom but an
active participant, an urbane, disarmingly effeminate
outsider who appears in
striking contrast to his surroundings.
Adapted by Dan Futterman from Gerald Clarke’s biography of the
same
name, Capote follows Capote as he tries to find In Cold Blood, to coax
his
masterpiece out of the unruly shadows of real life, to almost
literally
distil the book from its source, and in doing so, develop
intimate
relationships—especially with convicted killer Perry Smith—that
shroud
his blatant journalistic ambitions, causing one character to wonder if
the
book’s title is a reference to the murders or to the way Capote
exploits his
subjects. (The obvious third alternative reading of the title
would be in
reference to capital punishment.) A quietly provocative film,
Capote is a
critical portrait of a journalist in an ethical whirlpool, its
only problem
being its title and its closing title card, which inevitably
reduce Capote to
this single, if very powerful, period in his career.
At the film’s heart is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as
Capote,
blending virtuosic technical work—he uncannily speaks
Capote’s distinctive
voice without sounding like a
caricature—with brilliant instinct for playing a
delicate scene
forcefully, as well as on a number of other levels. He so fully
inhabits his
role that there’s no niggling sense of his steering us
toward
developing sympathies, antipathies or any one interpretation. Also one
of
Capote’s executive producers, Hoffman has an unusual dual perspective
on
the film and its particular meaning for him.
JB: Biopics are frequently infused with this false air of resolution
and
redemption, but Capote takes a highly critical approach of its subject.
Given
your task, was it difficult for you to compartmentalize the
film’s implications
about Capote, your own feelings about Capote and
your role embodying Capote?
Philip Seymour Hoffman: I didn’t know much about Capote when I
first
took the job, so at the start I was genuinely unbiased. As an actor, I
went
into this always trying to support his angle. That’s my work. But
sure,
looking from the outside I was quite aware of the harsh light that needed
to
be shone on him. I mean, that’s the story of this movie and I think it
has a
lot to say about the subsequent 20 years of Capote’s life.
JB: So when you’re playing Capote, how do you come to terms with
the
precarious way he conducts himself with his subjects?
PSH: I look at it like this: He has this person he’s talking to
who’s murdered
an entire family, so if Capote’s withholding
information or lying to this man,
there’s justification to be found in
this very crude fact. Beside that, I think
his ambition was burning him up
inside; he was almost helpless under the blaze
of white light he was walking
toward. And then the other thing is that I think
he’s very attracted to
Perry. He becomes close to both Perry and Dick and deals
with each
compassionately in his book. So I think he had ways to justify his
actions.
Of course it’s a no-win situation. He can’t have this book and
this
success and have Perry lingering. Perry needs to die for this work to
come to
life.
JB: Reading In Cold Blood after seeing Capote, I was very aware of the
erotic
element of Perry and Dick’s characterizations. It contributed to
this
sense of ambiguity regarding Capote’s true feelings: is he really drawn
to
these guys as much as he is repulsed, or is he purely manipulating them
into
false friendship for his own purposes?
PSH: He’s having all of these feelings for these men and is
nonetheless
manipulating them at the same time. That’s what made the script
so good. Yet I also think it’s very clear that his objective is always to
get
these men to trust him and tell him stuff. In that sense I don’t
know what you
mean by ambiguity.
JB: I suppose it’s just that thing that happens when we’re caught
up in
a movie. For me at least, while in the thick of it, I hope that
Capote’s
compassion or loyalty might run deeper than it does. It was
only at a point in
the last third or so that I could no longer doubt his
fundamental ruthlessness.
Until then, I’m still swayed by him telling
Harper Lee that he’s in love.
PSH: And he is! He does love him—but he also knows that the book
is
going to be the best thing that ever happened to him. Both things are
real.
And that’s what causes the tragedy. It’s complex, but it’s
not ambiguous
because those feelings are real.
JB: Something that separates Capote distinctly from Capote’s writing
is
how it works on the level of self-reflection. In a sense, it’s a
fiction
about a real person making a fiction about a real event.
PSH: Absolutely. We’re not making a documentary. There needs to
be
certain liberties taken in order to… well, in order to still tell the
truth;
the truth as we see it. But that’s the same thing Capote does in
his book: it’s
all factual, but from his angle. He provides a perspective and I think that’s
valuable. Otherwise it’s just a
document. The artistry lends itself to
discovering other truths.
JB: Perhaps one of these truths arises from the way the film reveals
a
proliferation of murder, the murder of the family allowing for the murder
of
the murderers. These murders, without superfluous commentary, bookend the
story,
in a way that reminded me of Kieslowski’s A Short Film About
Killing. Death
flows through these films. And this is also alluded to in the
book, when, near
the beginning, Capote writes about “four shotgun
blasts that, all told, ended
six human lives.”
PSH: You’re quite right, he’s very clear about those numbers and
their
consequences. Yet I have to say that I never thought about that theory
in
making the film because it’s not very actable. Themes aren’t
things you can
think about when you’re acting. Really, I think the film
is less about the
death penalty than it is about compromise and betrayal, and
is it worth the
price you pay? But you’ve hit on something in that,
although it might not seem
like it, you do see a lot of death in the movie.
In a way, it’s like Capote has
come to bear witness to all these
deaths. And the truth he discovers is that
they don’t pass through him
without leaving marks.
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