In the movie Capote, we see the man by the same name in his element. Cigarette and drink in hand, he is playing the raconteur at a New York literary soiree. He is telling a story about another writer’s novel, but we notice how everyone at the party is eating up his jokes and his sly humor.
Very shortly, however, Truman Capote will be very much out of his element. A story of a mass murder in Kansas catches his attention and he thinks that it might be something interesting to write about. So he takes the train to Holcomb, Kansas, near where the murders had taken place. In tow is his research assistance, Harper Lee, who is on the cusp of her own literary fame, thanks to the classic novel she is about the publish, To Kill a Mockingbird.
The people of Holcomb clearly don’t know what to make of Capote. His voice and mannerisms suggest a kind of southern fop that, while fascinating in the literary solons of New York, must be very off putting in the Heartland. Fortunately he has Harper Lee, a dowdy, reassuring southern lady, to help break the ice. And he has his own fame. Surprisingly, to him, there are people in Kansas who have actually read literature and are thus able to look past the voice and the manner.
The movie is as much about a book, In Cold Blood, as it is about its author. Or rather, it is about the making of that book and what it does for and too the author. In Cold Blood was the first in a genre called the non fiction novel, written in such a way that an account of true events reads as if it were a story.
In this case, the story is starts when two drifters, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock enter a farm house in search of a rumored ten thousand dollars. They wind up slaughtering the entire family, husband, wife, son, and daughter for a far tinier sum. In short order, the two murderers are caught and then the story of the movie begins in earnest.
Capote forms a strange bond with Perry Smith, whom he is trying to understand. Is it friendship? Is it love? Is it something else? Capote even arranges to have a lawyer hired to handle the appeals of the two murderers. This puts out the people of the town far more than Capote’s voice and mannerisms.
Foppishness is one thing. Arranging for a couple of mass murderers to escape their well deserved date with the hangman is something else entirely. One law enforcement officer offers to “go to Brooklyn” and hunt Capote down if the two murderers get off.
But Capote’s motives seem to be a little less pure than love or even a liberal bias against the death penalty. He seems to be trying to lengthen the lives of the two murderers, especially that of Perry Smith, so that he can pump them for as much information as possible. As soon as Capote gets what he wants, the legal help vanishes just in time for the final hearing before the Supreme Court. After all, if Smith and Hickock do not swing, the book has no ending and Capote will, “Have a nervous breakdown from which I will never recover.”
Still, Capote has to witness the deaths of the two main subjects of his book. For him it is an awful experience. He has likely never seen people die before and in a sense he has helped along the process. Though In Cold Blood is a massive success, considered the best book Capote has ever written, and started a new genre, it is the last book Capote ever completed. In Cold Blood was the making of Truman Capote and, paradoxically, the source of his destruction. We are told at the end of the movie that Capote dies in 1984 from complications of alcoholism, his literary career over. And therein lies the tragedy.
