I thought this was an excellent film. Released in 2005, it tells the story of Truman Capote's research that resulted in the book In Cold Blood. Directed by Bennett Miller, the film evokes brilliantly the conservative atmosphere of the Kansas where a farming family have been shot dead by two thieves. Into this walks Capote, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a camp name-dropping New York socialite journalist.
The film is complex, recording how Capote was deft at relating to people very different from him in the present but perhaps less so in the past. In particular, he forms a bond with one of the killers Perry Smith, sharing a similar troubled childhood ("it was as if Perry and I grew up in the same house; he stood up and went out the back door; where I went out the front"). However, at the same time, Truman is prepared to dissemble to get the story from the killers and also to abandon them on death row as he heads to Europe with his partner for an extended vacation. The film closes with his attending the hanging, gruesomely and realistically portrayed, after an appeal, apparently engineered by Truman, has failed - though a side of Truman never wanted it to succeed as it would have undermined his work.
It is this sort of tension and the duplicities to which they give rise that are so brilliantly teased out in the film.
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