Capote Redux

There's a good discussion of Capote on Slate. I have to admit that the two movies, of the five that were nominated for Best Picture this year at the Acadmey Awards, that have stayed with me most were Capote and Munich. I've defended Crash as not being a terrible movie, just a flawed good one, but I do have to admit that it was the weakest in the field at the Acadmy Awards. Here's a sample of the write up in Slate:

The misapprehension of Capote as a small movie begins with its own dedication to small moments. Early on it is a comedy of manners, in which a small town adjusts itself to the presence of a New York literary god, even as the New York literary god adjusts himself to the small town, in order to get it to talk. As the film progresses, so does Capote's obsession with Smith, whom he comes to regard as a version of himself. "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house," Capote tells Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), "then one day, he walked out the back door, and I walked out the front." (To which Lee, increasingly the moral center of the movie, replies "You kidding?") But Capote is not really a study of Capote's relationship with Smith. As Smith idles in his cell, poring over a copy of Walden given to him by Capote, Capote reads early chapters of his work-in-progress to a rapt New York audience. Later Capote sums up his feeling for Smith, hardly even noticing his words. "Do you hold him in esteem, Truman?" Lee asks him. "Well. He's a goldmine."

Capote's enormous power comes from its embodiment of all the virtues Capote the man eventually rejected—tact, self-control, reticence. Bennett Miller's palette is autumnal—one nice nugget from the DVD reveals how the color scheme of the film excluded entirely all reds and blues in favor of muted yellows and browns—and his pacing is deliberate, even stately. The movie argues, as others have, that the experience of courting Perry Smith to write In Cold Blood broke something within Capote and speeded his transition from the boy-sylph of apparently limitless talent, who published Other Voices, Other Rooms when he was 23, to the bitchy society lapdog of the '70s talk-show circuit. As a closing intertitle points out, Capote never published another book before dying of alcoholism in 1984. Within a year of publishing In Cold Blood, Capote had thrown the Black and White Ball, an affair at the Plaza Hotel that established, to the terror-laced glee of the haute mode, who was in and who was out in New York society. It was a harbinger of the Studio 54 Capote. A depressing anecdote dating from the '70s has Capote inviting the gossip columnist Liz Smith and John Berendt—later to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—up to his apartment in the U.N. Plaza. Capote left the room, then returned with a giant bowl of cocaine, which Smith guessed at the time represented $10,000 worth of the drug. As suddenly as he had brandished it, Capote snatched it away, saying, "No. No. I'm not going to give you any. You're not good enough. Neither one of you is good enough."

Click here for the rest of the article.

Comments

[Eric]

This excerpt is fascinating and on the mark, but you chose an apt time to truncate your post. The rest of the article veers toward a weird tangent.

Regardless, I agree that Capote was interesting in its complex depiction of colliding forces. It was infinitely more subtle than Crash. However, I still can't comprehend how you didn't think Brokeback Mountain was the best of the Oscar contenders.