Capote

While far from your usual mainstream movie, "Capote" is an absorbing story with a mesmerizing performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman. Cast as author Truman Capote, Hoffman embodies every single nuance of Capote's eccentric style. He will win the Oscar for this performance.

After reading about the murders of a farming family in Kansas, Capote decides he wants to write the story of the killings and the killers. Leaving his high society lifestyle behind in New York, he and his friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener, playing the author of "To Kill a Mockingbird") travel to the rural town shaken by the murders and begin to learn more about the family, their friends, and the effect the tragedy has had on the area. As Capote begins to build his story, he realizes that he has more than a newspaper article on his hands and decides to make a book out of the story. This will become the acclaimed best-seller "In Cold Blood".

The killers are eventually captured and Capote, who has befriended the chief investigator (Chris Cooper), is allowed unprecedented access to meet with each of them. He becomes increasingly intrigued with the story of Perry Smith (Clifton Collins), who Truman feels a bond with as they both had similar upbringings. It is this bond that is really at the center of the movie. In one sense, Capote is helping Smith avoid death as he hires a lawyer to get a stay of execution. He does this, however, to get the full story out of the murderer. Once Capote has what he needs, he nearly abandons Smith as he waits for the execution to occur in order to finish his story.

The psychological impact of what he has done to Smith takes a toll on Capote, and he begins to lose touch with society. By this point, he has invested nearly four years of his life focusing on this story and the two killers in order to write his book. The fact that he can't finish it until the two men are executed frustrates him to no end. Watching Hoffman portray this internal conflict is something you do not often encounter in the movies. We learn in the end that even though Capote becomes critically acclaimed for the eventual novel he produces, he never completes another book. He forever struggled with the impact of wishing for the execution of the two men.

"Capote" plays more in the vein of the independent, artsy films that not everyone will enjoy. The overall movie, though, is outstanding. I give it an A.

"Capote" is rated R with a running time of 115 minutes.