..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Capote

Directed by Bennett Miller
Sony Pictures Classics

Bennett Miller's made two accomplished movies, the documentary, The Cruise (1999), about Timothy "Speed" Levitch, a writer-want-to-be with a furiously fast, painful voice, and now Capote, (****) about a writer with a pinched, painful voice who achieves the pinnacle of his success and never completes another book. Aside from the whiny protagonists, there's no link between the two pictures except intelligence and patience. Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance captures the strangeness of being Truman Capote, and by extension, of being a writer. Serene and studied, Capote well captures what it means to observe, the discomfort of the observer when he thinks he is not being seen, caught out, dissected. Like the book Capote is researching and writing in the movie, "In Cold Blood," the "first nonfiction novel," about two men accused of killing a family in a Kansas farmhouse, Capote is a marvel of empathy, formally and emotionally engaged while building to a powerful, sorrowful conclusion. Catherine Keener speaks volumes as Nell Harper Lee (who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird), just with her keenly calibrated expressions as the friend who accompanies Capote to Kansas as his researcher. Two-thirds or so through, there's one small, exquisite dash of beauty, surely an allusion to a similar set of shots in Bertolucci's The Conformist, and equivalent to Conrad L. Hall's memorable rain-shadowed-on-face shot of Robert Blake from Richard Brooks' film, but it is utterly apt at this instant. We see a widescreen frame of almost total blackness, and a pattern of light from passing headlamps seen through a lattice of Venetian blinds striates bright and there is a cut of a counter-shot of the same light and shadow playing across the sleepless Capote's face. You'll hear much about the acting, fine across the board, but the quiet intelligence and wit of the screenwriting, framing, cutting and lighting, is a joy to behold even as the story moves toward its inevitable tragic conclusion.

- Ray Pride