By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Stanley Kauffmann loved it: Capote
Stanley Kauffmann reviewed Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and at 89, he’s still around to review Bennett Miller’s Capote in New Republic: “I reviewed the book adversely in these pages when it was published in 1965. I was put off by the suggestion of relish that touched Capote’s recounting of the murders, the prosecution of the killers, the interviews with them in their cells during the five years between trial and execution, and the inevitable chill of the hangings. But at least Capote wasn’t present personally in the book…. But this new film is his story…
A re-reading of the book seems to italicize the literary flourishes intended to make it, in Capote’s words, a new form, the “non-fiction novel.” … It is now more patent that Capote describes conversations and actions among the four victims that could not have been known to anyone else. Salient, too, is the apparent influence of the film medium on the book’s structure: the book is “edited” cinematically, with the interweaving of disparate sequences in ways that make their juncture inevitable… A slight conceptual nudge and Capote would have focused on (as the closing line tells us) its true subject: an American author’s success story. That theme is there, all right, but because it is not centered it is repellent, as the film pretends to be an account of the author’s descent into collateral agony… With the true theme of fame-hunger fully fashioned, the film would have been a more authentic American epic.”