Capote
- Title: Capote
- IMDb: link
Capote is the latest biographical film that provides a wonderful juicy role for an actor, this time for Philip Seymour Hoffman. The film is well shot and pieced together, and cleverly cast with great performances. Yet….there is something missing. Although this is a very good film, almost completely overshadowed by Hoffman’s performance, it never becomes the great film it aspires to be.
The film looks at Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) during his period of researching and writing his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. Traveling to Kansas with him is his friend and confidant Harper Lee (Catherine Keener). Capote interviews the town sheriff Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) and his family about the murder of a local family.
Two men are arrested and charged for the crime, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Dick Hickock (Mark Pellegrino). They are tried and sentenced to hang for the murders. Capote befriends Perry and gets them a new lawyer to file an appeal in order to keep the two alive long enough for him to get the full story of the murders for his book.
…
There seems to be a belief in Hollywood that if you make an incomprehensible film that looks pretty and add a twist ending that shocks the audience but doesn’t fulfill the needs of the movie to explain what is happening then you’ve met your obligation to the audience. Stay is an unfathomable mess of a movie that meanders its way through flashbacks, reversals, timestops, and fancy camera tricks. All well and good, but in the end the film has nothing to say. It’s as if we’re watching a film student’s exercise in using different film and storytelling techniques, but the professor forgot to look over his script to see that there is no story there. I went to see Doom on the same day I saw Stay and folks that’s enough to drive most people out of movie theaters for years. I don’t mind taking one for the team now and then, but two in ten hours…well, I wouldn’t wish that on even my worst enemy—maybe Rob Schneider and Carrot Top.
