In colder blood?

Ethical questions rise from the dead in Capote.

By Susan Gerhard

TRUMAN CAPOTE APPARENTLY loved black and white: It was the dress code he enforced at his infamous ball, as well as the aesthetic scheme chosen for the film version of In Cold Blood. But Capote's own life is one that can only be pictured in fully confusing rainbow color. George Plimpton probably best captures and refracts Capote's effervescent-to-the-point-of-evaporative personality in his 1997 dishy oral history, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, with Capote's generosities, vanities, and achievements recalled, trumped up, and/or reduced by those still smarting from the blows. It's all testimonial, much of it competing, which is why it's hard to imagine transferring the relativist insights of Plimpton's book to the screen (a film with an option on the book is set to come out next year). Capote's was a life that resists easy summary.

So it's appealing that the first Hollywood biopic on Capote ignores formula, boils the time frame down to six pivotal years, and turns one agonizing chapter of his life into an opportunity for an essay. Based, the filmmakers claim, on the Gerard Clarke biography published in 1988, Capote, directed by Bennett Miller and written by Dan Futterman, actually has a lot more in common with Janet Malcolm's 1990 The Journalist and the Murderer (a relationship the filmmakers also acknowledge). It's not so much a story of Capote as the illustration of the question Malcolm so artfully dodged: What, really, do journalists owe their subjects? In this case, what did the glittering Capote owe the two killers who lent him their life stories for his nonfiction "novel"?

There've been so many journalists exploiting so many murderers in the past half century that one wonders, why choose this one? It may be because this particular pairing takes the genre back to its roots, and still may be the most classic case of its kind. Stripped down to its essence: Capote befriended and supported Bill Hickock and Perry Smith as they sat on death row, but he often admitted to hoping for expeditious deaths once he got what he needed. As long as they kept on living in limbo, their lives, which Capote had taken such an interest in, were holding up his career.

Or at least that's one way of looking at it. This film, fortunately, gives us a few. There is, of course, the love story: The film serves up killer Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) as a virile delicacy, chewing the aspirin Capote gives him impressively, without water. Because Philip Seymour Hoffman's Capote is so often pictured as crass – reveling in it almost to the point of camp – it leaves us room to see the humor in the chasm between Capote's outward posture and his inward torment. Are you supposed to hate a writer who brings bags of baby food to a prisoner, in an attempt to keep him alive? Maybe you are, especially when that jar of strained something-or-other reappears in a scene in which the now-wallowing-in-self-pity Capote mixes it with the staple food of his diet, Scotch whiskey.

Hints of the hundred separate movies that could be made from Capote's life emerge in key details: The swishy floor-length scarf he rattles like a saber in Kansas's cop HQ calls to mind the family warfare that accompanied his growing up gay in the '30s and '40s; the bottle of booze he doesn't seem to leave home without foreshadows a grim decline. This film makes a wonderful habit of entering ensemble scenes midsentence, creating a vérité feel without the sea-sickening camera, capturing Capote in his native habitat, entertaining crowds over cocktails. Aside from a few overplayed notes from Hoffman, it's hard to find fault with the casting. Mark Pellegrino's Hickock comes off like Will Ferrell's George W. Bush: perfect. Catherine Keener, gently butch as the conscience of the film, Harper Lee, nails Capote's alter ego and "research assistant," hired on for her ability to steward Capote into Holcomb, Kan.'s housewives' hearts. Chris Cooper seamlessly morphs into good cop Alvin Dewey, who is another character Capote coyly co-opts for his own uses.

It's a cliffhanger, in its way: The verdict on Smith and Hickock arrives relatively early in the film; it's the final verdict on Capote that is saved for the climax. Frankly, years after Kenneth Tynan cried foul over Capote's lack of compassion for his subjects, the jury's still out about what temperature Capote's blood ran. But it's still hard to answer Malcolm's question with anything close to black and white.

'Capote' opens Fri/7 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for showtimes.