CAPOTE: THE PRICE OF GETTING THE STORY

At first glance, Capote appears to be a biography of Truman Capote. It is, but only in a very narrow sense. The film focuses on the years Capote spent researching and writing In Cold Blood, his account of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. More importantly, the movie is about what happened to Capote as he became increasingly entangled with the crime, the investigation, and one of the men who committed the murders.

The facts of the crime are senseless. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith drove hundreds of miles to Holcomb after hearing that Herbert Clutter kept thousands of dollars in a safe inside his home. There was no safe. After entering the house through an unlocked door, Hickock and Smith stole only a small amount of money and then murdered the Clutter family so there would be no witnesses.

Capote reads about the murders and immediately believes they could become the subject of his next book. He travels to Kansas with his friend, writer Harper Lee, and begins interviewing people connected to the case. What follows is not simply an investigation by a writer. Capote works his way into the lives of nearly everyone who can give him access to the story.

Throughout the film, Capote manipulates people when it helps him get information. He charms the lead detective's wife so that he can gain access to the detective and the case. At the funeral home, he slips away to look at the Clutters' bodies. He cultivates a friendship with the lead detective and his family, then later risks that relationship by helping obtain appellate lawyers for Hickock and Smith. He also uses money and influence to secure extraordinary access to the defendants in prison.

His most important relationship is with Perry Smith. Capote needs Smith to tell him what happened inside the Clutter home, but the relationship gradually becomes more complicated than a writer interviewing a murderer. Capote recognizes something in Smith. He sympathizes with him, identifies with parts of his background, and at times seems genuinely concerned about what will happen to him.

At the same time, Capote needs an ending for his book. The appeals that keep Smith and Hickock alive also keep In Cold Blood unfinished. That creates the film's central moral conflict: Capote helps the defendants stay alive, yet the masterpiece he believes he is writing cannot truly be completed until their legal cases—and ultimately their lives—come to an end. His friendship with Smith and his ambition as a writer begin pulling him in opposite directions.

That conflict is what makes Capote more interesting to me than a conventional biography. The film is not merely about how In Cold Blood was written. It asks what happens when a writer becomes too close to his subject, and whether it is possible to care about someone while also using that person's life for a story. Capote wants Smith to trust him, but he also needs Smith to give him the details that will make his book complete.

TF'S NOTES

In my book, Court for Last Chances, the main character plays a game when he is about to meet a new client. He reads the police reports, learns the details of the crime, and then imagines what the defendant will look like before meeting him. Afterward, he compares the person standing in front of him with the person he had created in his mind.

I wrote that because it is something I tend to do myself. After reading the facts of a case, I form an image of the defendant. Sometimes I am surprisingly close. Other times I am completely wrong.

I think Capote experiences something similar when he first sees Hickock and Smith. Hickock, at least as portrayed in the film, seems to fit the role Capote might have imagined. Smith does not. He appears quiet, sensitive, and strangely out of place. The man does not seem to match the crime.

That disconnect becomes more important as Capote gets to know Smith. The more he learns about Smith's childhood and background, the harder it becomes for him to see Smith only as one of the men who murdered the Clutter family. Smith becomes a person rather than simply a character in a crime story.

In my career, I have represented dozens of people convicted of murder. Meeting with them can be unsettling for a reason that has little to do with physical fear. As you get to know someone and learn about his background, you sometimes discover that his life is not as completely foreign from your own as you expected it to be.

There are certainly people who are extraordinarily dangerous and who may remain dangerous. But many people convicted of murder are not movie monsters. They are human beings who made a terrible decision—or a series of terrible decisions—that ended another person's life and permanently changed their own. That realization can be disturbing because it removes some of the comfortable distance between "them" and "us."

The frightening question is not whether we are secretly murderers. It is how much of a person's life can turn on choices, circumstances, anger, fear, addiction, desperation, or a single moment from which there is no return. When you sit across from someone who committed a terrible crime and still recognize parts of an ordinary human being, the line separating his life from yours can feel less absolute than it did before.

I think Capote reaches that point with Smith. In the film, he describes their similarities by saying that it was as though he and Smith grew up in the same house: Smith went out the back door while Capote went out the front. It is a powerful way of describing two people who may share certain wounds or experiences but whose lives ultimately travel in radically different directions.

That may also explain why Capote eventually begins pulling away from Smith as the executions draw closer. Smith is no longer merely the subject Capote needs for his book. He has become a reminder of how complicated it is to reduce a person to the worst thing he has ever done.

And that is where Capote works best. The movie leaves us with an uncomfortable question about the storyteller as much as the murderer. Capote wants to understand Perry Smith, but he also needs to use him. He wants Smith to live, yet he needs the story to end. In Cold Blood may have been Capote's masterpiece, but the film suggests that finishing it came at a personal cost.