This is supposed to be a post about
Capote, the intensely good new film co-produced by and starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman, with screenplay by
Dan Futterman.
This is supposed to be. But it can’t only be.
(Because I said so, that's why.)
I’m currently blogging from a family member's dial-up connection somewhere in the metropolitan Southwest, an Internet connection that can flatteringly be described as separating the men from the boys in the way of user-friendly sites.
So a lot of what I want to tell you will be through text rather than my usual pithy links.
Like, I can’t rightly tell you tonight whether the contents of Sony Picture’s official Capote site would say
way better all the things I am saying, and in way less time, because it was taking too long to load the pages behind that simple façade showing Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the role that is certain to win him Oscar status if not the Golden Boy himself.
So you will have to hear my color commentary instead.
Maybe my meandering post will be Tru to the movie’s spirit, which reveals nothing so much as the vortices of our professional relationships and praxis.
The film turns on such relationships, on their resemblance to love and their wide divergences, on the uses and misuses of trust, on the slippery ethics of the writer’s life.
And on the frail lines between regard and rubbernecking, homage and manipulation, love and lust: lust for attention, for understanding, for above all the intense freebasing high of having
nailed it right there on the page, the actual thing, the truth itself, for the blink that lasts forever…much like another peak human experience we spend far too much time seeking.
The libidinous tug of the writer’s craft, and the difficult consequences of abandoning oneself to the ecstasy of consummation.
The natural treachery—I am sorry, but it’s true—of the documenter’s mind. To save a life, or snap a picture? Or, if you’re Capote, maybe to try to save a life long enough to get the picture.
And the pleasures, ohhhh, the things that keep us going—the high of actually finishing, at a dead heat, eight or twelve or fourteen hours straight of nothing but and noplace else to focus but this holy-seeming mission of The Book (sound familiar,
riannan? Like a patient etherized upon the table, maybe?)
And the promise of holding a crowd in sway, in awe because you have found the words to say what is unsayable, in awe because you have found where silence is better still, and woven the two--sound and silence--into a rhythm that drives everyone forward toward the climax.
It’s communal. It’s ritual. It’s sexual.
“If called upon to make a speech…Oh for the life of me, I don’t know what to say…” Those are not Capote's words, but killer Perry Smith's, words that Capote reads to his friend Harper Lee with a relish that cannot, will not, be placed: Is he marveling at the connection he feels with Smith, or Smith's vulnerability, the childish place where the urge to celebrity germinates? Or remarking, without a shred of irony, on how unlikely Smith is to ever do anything worthy of a speech? Or mourning Smith's intelligence and humanity, soon to go to dust?
Hoffman plays it perfectly: all the feelings, all at once, contempt and pity and adoration and admiration and kinship, all of it at once. But most of all--best of all, worst of all--his own desire to document it.
We never doubt that Capote is interested in accuracy--at least in this version of the story. The production team for
Capote goes out of its way to impress upon us that professional ethics in the conventional sense of the word were not Capote's problem. In the real world there's doubt about this, but in the story world of the film, the insistence on Capote's excellence as a journalist really serves to make a similar point to that of his detractors, and to make it more chillingly.
We don't like to think that trust and professionalism and the imperative to create something that endures--dedication, in other words--can actually make feeble, mewling, self-aggrandizing simps of the best of us. But Futterman, the screenwriter, and Gerald Clarke, the author on whose book the movie is based, do know, as writers, whereof they speak.
Not only do the ends not justify the means, but the cleanest and most ethical practice does not ethics make.
I am thinking, because this film is about making a book, that the film was also about making itself. There's a self-referential quality to it, a Godel-defying attempt by the system of creation to understand itself in the act. It is clear that this is Hoffman's film, and the role is like no other he has ever played. I want to know more about his professional connection to the rest of the team, and where the impetus to get the film made originally came from. Who found the book? How'd it all start? Did the screenplay result from an individual's vision or a group effort among energetic young men (this is undeniably a very male production). Did they gather at a diner for breakfast or at a party, or a playdate with their kids, or make phone calls or emails fly back and forth, one pal to the next?
I won't know till I get home and can zoom around lightening fast on my broadband.
I wish I were organized enough to say more about this movie--yes, dammit,
movie--take that,
intellectual-lover--with its excellent cast of WHISHs (I dub it! I just figured out this acronym for those “Where Have I Seen Him/Her” actors we love, like Bob Balaban and Catherine Keener and Marshall Bell, actors who shoulder the burden of crucial support in most movies as well as the responsibility for most “Sssshhh!”s in movies and homes during screenings, as people like me start bugging their companions to tell them WWHST). But the limits of my technology, and the late hour, prevail.
Incidentally, we get another crack at this topic in the new year, when Douglas McGrath's film based on
George Plimpton's 1997 bio, Infamous, comes out with Toby Jones as Capote and Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee.
[photo of Truman Capote via
Slate]
What can I say about my friends Jane and José?
