Murder most foul makes a marvelous read

In 1959, a newspaper article about the murder of the Clutter family in the tiny town of Holcomb, Kansas, caught the eye of the novelist Truman Capote. He spent most of the next half-dozen years following the case, which ended with the execution of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith and the subsequent publication of In Cold Blood, Capote's best-selling mutation of the true crime potboiler into bona fide literature.

Bennett Miller's Capote is a fascinating and fine-grained reconstruction of that period in its subject's life, a time when he pursued literary glory and flirted with moral ruin. "This is the beginning of a great love affair -- between Truman and himself," someone says, but the film suggests that Capote's obsession with the Clutter murders, and his drive to alchemize their ugly pointlessness into deathless prose, might better be described as a Faustian bargain.

In any case, Capote is, principally, the story of a writer's vexed, all-consuming relationship with his work, and therefore with himself. This makes for better drama than you might expect. Capote's human connections are, for the most part, secondary and instrumental, which makes Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance all the more remarkable, since he must connect with the audience without piercing the membrane of his character's narcissism. Not only does Hoffman achieve an impressive physical and vocal transformation -- mimicking Capote's chirpy drawl and appearing to shrink to his elfin stature -- but he also conveys, with clarity and subtlety, the complexities of Capote's temperament.

"It appears that with his curious voice, his ways, he decided to brazen it out, to be himself with an ornamental courage and an impressive conceit," Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote, and Hoffman bears out her insight. There is neediness and vulnerability to Hoffman's Capote, but his dominant traits are guile, vanity and the self-confident toughness of the outsider.

A gay man in the era of Kennedy/Rat Pack machismo, a Southerner in New York, a New Yorker in Kansas, he walks into every new situation sure of who he is and sure that he will soon prove himself to be, once again, the most interesting person in the room. His whispery, stuttering self-presentation serves as a feint, deflecting notice from his essential steeliness. Prefiguring the talk show and tabloid self-parody he would later become, this Capote drinks, gossips, teases and whines, but mostly he works, with methodical intensity and ruthless discipline.

The movie's deep subject, crisply delineated in Dan Futterman's fine script (drawn from Gerald Clarke's biography) and dramatized without undue didacticism by Miller, is the risk and cost of this work. Following a hunch, Capote persuades William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker (played by Bob Balaban), to send him to Kansas. He brings along his childhood friend, Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), to be his "research assistant and personal bodyguard," and the two of them, using New York glamour, Southern charm and Scotch whiskey, try to separate the residents of Holcomb from their natural reticence. They interview friends of the Clutters and befriend the lead investigator on the case, Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper), and his star-struck wife, Marie (the wonderful Amy Ryan), who even in the wake of an appalling crime cannot contain her delight at having a famous writer in her living room.