At a roadside diner, Truman Capote thinks out loud. "In Cold Blood," he says, testing the title of his book-to-be. "Isn't it good?"
Alvin Dewey, an agent for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, stares at him. "Is that referring to the crime or the fact that you're talking to the criminals?"
Capote, a troubling study of the genesis of its namesake's landmark "nonfiction novel," never provides a clear answer to this question. This moral ambiguity is disturbing, but magnificent.
When acclaimed writer Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) spots a 1959 headline for the violent murder of the Clutters, a Midwestern Methodist family, he finds the story he was "always meant to write."
With childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) -- soon to publish her Pulitzer prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird -- he travels to Holcomb, Kan. Here, he begins his research, cultivating relationships with the townspeople as well as the two convicted murderers sentenced to death.
But the ghastly interviews and the gruesome plot of November 1959 begin to molest Capote's psyche. Four years later, as the legal appeals drag on, he prays for an end to his novel. But the end of his story means the end of the killers' lives.
At its heart, Capote is a chilling, stunning ghost story. The score's austere chords and eerie timbre haunt the skeletal landscape of the Kansas prairie. Yet the real ghosts reside in the relationship Capote forms with Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), one of the killers, who both mesmerizes and repulses him. In his interviews -- conducted in cage-like prison cells and through long-distance phone calls -- Capote sees a distorted mirror, a twisted self-portrait of the artist that fascinates and frightens both himself and the audience.
Despite their exterior differences -- Capote's formal bow-ties and flamboyant social facade contrast with Perry's vibrant tattoos and growling voice -- the men share similar childhoods of abandonment and parental neglect.
Capote tells Nelle, "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day, he stood up and went out the back door while I went out the front."
The clout of Capote resides in its dubious implications; the terrifying territory into which its trespasses but never invades; the themes it suggests but never confirms.
Scenes of staggering intimacy spook the viewer -- glimpses of Capote nursing the prisoner with baby food or coaxing the lethal story out of Perry with cell-block hugs, amicable letters and promised lawyers fill the film. The ambiguous nature of the men's relationship -- professional, friendly or potentially homoerotic -- distresses both Capote and the audience. The lies he tells Perry -- that he hasn't started his book, that he doesn't know its title -- complicate and confound the story.
The same can be said of Hoffman's acting, which transcends excellence in its mastery of Capote's peculiar voice, ostentatious mannerisms and inner torment. As Lee, Keener complements her co-star with understated dignity.
In writing his book, a meditation on the convergence of violent criminality and middle-class conservatism, Capote altered the nature of the American novel. He demonstrated that the gruesome reality of real-life was as fertile to creativity as the author's imagination. Likewise, Capote transforms life into art, leaving the viewer's blood cold.
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