In the film Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman, as writer Truman Capote, vocalizes the film’s theme by comparing himself to killer Perry Smith — one of the subjects of his seminal book In Cold Blood: “It’s as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day he went out the back door and I went out the front.”  The film, based on the acclaimed biography of the same name by Gerald Clarke, is about a fierce, uncontrollable need for recognition and how two seemingly opposites are connected by a self-destruction rooted in childhood trauma that seems almost fateful.

Much like Jamie Foxx’s uncanny portrayal of Ray Charles in last year’s Ray, Mr. Hoffman not only embodies Truman Capote’s physical nature but incredibly shines light on the inner psyche of a writer whose exterior mannerisms and unique voice are rooted in popular culture.  I was stunned when half way through the film I realized I was watching an actor portraying a real person and not simply the man himself — like watching a very expensive home movie.  Capote has been out of the collective consciousness for quite some time, but for those of us who remember watching him on such 70s talk shows as Merv Griffin, Hoffman’s Capote is probably more accurate than the caricature Capote himself played for the cameras.

Unlike Ray, screenwriter Dan Futterman and director Bennett Miller, lifelong friends with Hoffman, did not make a simple biopic but rather a Shakespearean drama about how opposites attract…and collide.  The always lovely and amazing Catherine Keener portrays Nelle Harper Lee, Capote’s boyhood friend who became his assistant during the research for the book In Cold Blood — the subject of the film – shortly before her own novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, was published to great acclaim.  Keener’s Lee is less a character in the film and more the conscience of Truman Capote and a way for him to connect to the real world represented in this case by the small Kansas farming community where the murders of the Clutter family took place.

Every character in Capote, from the killers (Clifton Collins, Jr. and Mark Pelligrino) to the Kansas investigator Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) to Capote’s lifelong companion Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood) seems to have a bipolar, love-hate relationship with the writer of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and like that book’s main character, Holly Golightly, it’s difficult to hate him even with all of his unflattering, self-centered, and hurtful traits.  Capote was adept at manipulation, convincing killers, investigators, townspeople, and his closest friends that he was sincere, but in the end, his own dysfunctional desire to be the life of the party led to his own self-destruction.  Like a Muslim fundamentalist, Truman Capote was instrumental in his own grandiose demise by strapping on his book In Cold Blood like a suicide bomb, blowing his life to pieces while at the same time establishing a new form of literature — the nonfiction novel.  From the moment his book was finished, it was the beginning of a slow death that took twenty years to come about.  At his death from alcoholism in 1984, he was only a shadow of the genius writer who invented a new literary style and personified the New York elite.  It was as if he jumped into his own unfinished manuscript and became one of his lonely characters whose only desire is for someone to pat them on the back and tell them they’ve done a great job.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is a shoe-in for an Academy Award nomination, and perhaps the film will garner some as well.  If you’re looking for escapism, Capote isn’t the film for you, but if you want a well-crafted, well-acted character study without all the bells and whistles Hollywood throws at us most of the time, you’ll be greatly satisfied.

Rich Burlingham