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Hoffman takes a star turn in channeling 'Capote'

In the exceptional character study of author and personality Truman Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman resembles a furless hare in tortoiseshell glasses. Pink and supersensitive, he sniffs out the toxic secrets beneath landscapes and faces, swallows them whole, and coughs up a masterpiece about the secure, stable world of the American heartland and the rootless drifters who would despoil it. Capote spans the years 1959 to 1965. It opens with the Breakfast at Tiffany's scribe reading a news story about the Clutters, four members of a prosperous farming family, found murdered in Holcomb, Kan., and ends with the snap of the hangman's noose that concludes his 1966 nonfiction classic In Cold Blood.

In the exceptional character study of author and personality Truman Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman resembles a furless hare in tortoiseshell glasses. Pink and supersensitive, he sniffs out the toxic secrets beneath landscapes and faces, swallows them whole, and coughs up a masterpiece about the secure, stable world of the American heartland and the rootless drifters who would despoil it.

Capote spans the years 1959 to 1965. It opens with the Breakfast at Tiffany's scribe reading a news story about the Clutters, four members of a prosperous farming family, found murdered in Holcomb, Kan., and ends with the snap of the hangman's noose that concludes his 1966 nonfiction classic In Cold Blood.

The implication of this stunning (in both meanings of the word) film portrait from director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman is that Capote himself possessed the sangfroid of those killers whose violence he harvested and spun into literary gold.

Capote's landmark chronicle, which wore the hats of crime story and writerly nonfiction, blazed the trail for The Executioner's Song, Fatal Vision, and, alas, Inside the Mind of Scott Peterson. But to report the events, Capote likewise wore two hats (or is it two faces?): those of befriender and betrayer. He was a charmer who pried secrets from people in the guise of helping them and a rake who exploited those secrets for personal gain.

Chin upthrust with lordly disdain, hands aflutter, voice oscillating between whisper and squeal, Hoffman gives a performance that's uncanny, both because it embodies the writer and shrewdly analyzes his contradictory traits of strength and helplessness.

Swathed in a camel's hair coat and cashmere scarf, he cuts a curious figure in homespun Kansas. The filmmakers suggest that he would have drowned in the amber waves of grain but for his human flotation device, Harper Lee (the superlative, if subdued, Catherine Keener), the film's moral compass. Lee, his childhood friend, conveniently had just shipped her masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird, to her agent and thus was available to be Capote's intellectual lifeguard.

(Those familiar with Lee's novel and the movie it spawned probably know that Scout's neighbor, Dill, is based on young Truman.)

But Capote did not want to be saved from Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr., in a magnetic performance), the angel-faced, devil-hearted accused killer who captured the writer's imagination and, it is suggested, his heart.

The author's identification with Smith was so profound - "it's as though we grew up in the same house" - that In Cold Blood is equal parts love poem and death sentence. Capote convinces Perry that he is there to help with his defense, all the while praying for an execution that will make the story more dramatic.

Miller and Futterman tell their story with plain, uninflected film language, permitting the ambiguities to surface. Theirs is not the anti-capital-punishment tract of Richard Brooks' excellent 1967 film In Cold Blood. It is a story about an accomplice to crime who lived to tell the story.

Capote engages both the practical and the moral implications of Capote's achievement. At the end we hold him in exasperated ambivalence. Can we love the writer and damn the man?

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey

at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

Capote

*** 1/2 (out of four stars)

Produced by Caroline Baron, Michael Ohoven and William Vince, directed by Bennett Miller, written by Dan Futterman, photography by Adam Kimmel, music by Mychael Danna, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.

Running time: 1 hour, 38 mins.

Truman Capote. . . Philip Seymour Hoffman

Harper Lee. . . Catherine Keener

Perry Smith. . . Clifton Collins Jr.

Alvin Dewey. . . Chris Cooper

Jack Dunphy. . . Bruce Greenwood

Parent's guide: R (violence, profanity)

Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse and Ritz Sixteen/New Jersey