This is not a biography of Truman Capote, but rather a biography of his last complete major work "In Cold Blood." I read this book as a teenager and thought it brilliant and disturbing. This film does a wonderful job of depicting the moral ambiguity of Capote's work, his egotism, and the life history and inner conflicts which allowed him to create this great work. All the same, the subject matter here is really not explored in the depths it deserves, and the film sometimes loses its focus in the depth and quality of its performances.

Hoffman has already won a number of awards for his performance. I have no qualms about this - he's a great actor and this is a challenging and powerful role played to the hilt. However, I also want to point out the tremendous supporting cast. Catherine Keener and Clifton Collins are both deserving of recognition for their intense portrayals of Harper Lee and Perry Smith.

If you're a fan of Capote, or a fan of In Cold Blood, you will enjoy this, though it isn't really going to show you anything that you were not aware of. If you are the sort who goes to movies you're not necessarily that interested in just because a great performance is involved (like me in this case), you will likely enjoy Capote.

Director Bennet Miller's "Capote" is a film that shows great intelligence in the way it captured the essence of Truman Capote, a man who achieved fame and notoriety with most of the fiction he wrote. This film concentrates in the period of his life in which he got obsessed by a notorious murder case of the fifties about the murder of a family in Kansas.

Dan Futterman has written the screen play based on the book by Gerald Clarke. The film is an account about the writing of the novel "In Cold Blood" that showed how the two young men who committed the heinous crime are caught, processed and hanged for their actions.

If you haven't watched the film, perhaps you would like to stop here.

When the film opens we get a vision of a lonely house in the distance. This being the Midwest, we are given a flat expanse devoid of elevations anywhere. The camera takes us to that lonely house as a young woman comes calling for her friend that lives in there. Not getting any response, she goes in to a room upstairs where she discovers her friend has been killed. The colors are dark, as is the tone of the film.

Truman Capote, who had been connected to the New Yorker magazine, sees the article in the N.Y. Times and gets interested. This case that shocked the country, at the time, shows a promise for the writer. The next time we meet him, he is in the small town in Kansas accompanied by his good friend and steadying influence, Nell Harper Lee, a writer.

By becoming friendly with the sheriff's wife, Mr. Capote gets a privilege by having access to the two murderers. Truman is clearly deeply affected by his relationship with Perry Smith, a handsome dark man who shows a lot of intensity. By gaining their trust, Capote is able to put together his best selling book "In Cold Blood", which will revolutionize American letters in the way the two criminals are portrayed.

Truman Capote, while pursuing the completion of his book, doesn't come clean to Perry Smith. In fact, when questioned about things he has learned, Capote gives evasive answers because he is not prepared to share with his main subject things that clearly should have been clarified from the start.

Watching the brilliant take of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote on the screen, brought to mind another great actor, Meryl Streep, who like Mr. Hoffman is a chameleon in the interpretation of a character. Mr. Hoffman is perfect as the writer because he has captured every mannerism and the speech inflection of Truman Capote. Catherine Keener is perfect as Nelle, the true friend and companion. Bruce Greenwood plays Truman Capote's companion Jack Dunphy. Chris Cooper is totally wasted as Sheriff Dewey.

Adam Kimmel excellent cinematography contributes to the atmosphere the director gave the film because of the use of muted colors in what appear to be the bleak winter of the Midwest.

Capote Reviewed by Sam Osborn

Rating: 3.5 out of 4

Director: Bennett Miller Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Chris Cooper Screenplay: Dan Futterman MPAA Classification: R (some violent images and brief strong language)

It seems that once a year we're treated to a performance so staggeringly magnificent that it seems as if the actor's a shoe-in for the Academy's Best Actor prize. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is just that actor for 2005. His portrayal of Truman Capote was best described by Telluride Film Festival's Galaxy Theater host as a "resurrection". Like Jamie Foxx's Ray, Charlize Theron's Monster, and Nicole Kidman's Virginia Wolfe, Hoffman's Capote is simply devastating. He stated at Telluride that after first accepting the role and watching a recording of Truman Capote he frankly thought he was in over his head. But throughout pre-production he gathered and compiled all of Capote's mannerisms and began practicing them, slowly and truly becoming Truman Capote. And from the first line of Hoffman's dialogue, with his squinched high voice, and self-absorbed tone we know he's succeeded. The actual film is nearly eclipsed by Hoffman's performance. But Director Bennett Miller and an impressive supporting cast manage to keep up with Hoffman's breakneck achievement. Shot in monochromatic, nearly black and white starkness, the film inherits a raw power that builds to its stunning climactic sequence. And although the film drags some in the middle, it finishes strong and leaves us with much to discuss. It's provocative, stark, and powerful.

Capote opens with the discovery of a family of four murdered in the small town of Hokum, Kansas in 1953 (don't quote me on the date, please). Coming off his second novel, Truman Capote (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is searching for his next project. Intrigued by the murders, he takes the investigation, agreeing on authoring an article for The New Yorker. Meeting with the town's Sheriff, Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper), he's met with opposition in the town for his peculiar manner. But his companion on the investigation, Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), offsets his homosexuality with terse, homegrown professionalism.

Months later the two killers, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Richard Hickcock (Mark Pellegrino) are apprehended by Sheriff Dewey and soon sentenced to death. Finding himself increasingly drawn to the story by the sentence, Truman begins personally interviewing the murderers, particularly Perry Smith, at their maximum security prison. Avoiding discussion of the murders themselves, Capote learns more about their lives outside of crime, finding a humanity never put into print before and causing him to extend his article for The New Yorker into the full-length novel, In Cold Blood. It would be the first True Crime novel ever written. His extensive interviews with Smith lead to a strange relationship open to many terms of controversial interpretation. He feels compelled to assist the men and lead the world's opinion away from demonizing headlines. Capote even goes to lengths to find them a decent lawyer for their Supreme Court appeal.

The screenplay deals with this controversy between Capote and Smith with beautiful ambiguity. Screenwriter Dan Futterman leaves it to Capote's character to interpret their relationship for the audience, instead of the story doing so in a ham-handed way. And with Hoffman's performance so obsessively complete, the result is magnificent. We oddly understand Capote's pain and his unique love for Perry Smith. He obviously sees the monster inside, but realizes the human entirely. Some even speculated around the festival that Capote fell in love with Smith. It's incredibly profound.

But at the same time, Futterman's screenplay relies too much on Capote's obsession with Smith. Audience's in the 50's were terrified by Capote's humanistic realization of the murderer, but now, that sort of True Crime journalism is accepted, and even expected, from murder investigations. This reliance causes the film to linger too long on Capote's build-up interviews before the shocking, twisting confession he needs to finish the novel. Also, audiences have recently grown tired of the biopic, probably because of the last year's heaping pile of them. This mutes the typical drama that occurs in all dramatic biopics, with the character's slow deterioration.

Despite these flaws, Capote is still an arresting portrait of a murder. And to go along with this portrait is the complete resurrection of Truman Capote in Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The film works to succeed beyond a simple biopic. It also hits on the difficult topic of true crime, delving into the imagination and conscience of a man that killed in cold blood.