Awesome Movie Review: Capote

I don’t care for biopics. 97% of people aren’t worth knowing. And of the 3% worth knowing, few are exciting and dynamic as me. Sure there is the upper echelon of humanity, consisting of people like Ichiro!, Morrissey, Vin Diesel and Christopher Lee, but even the majority of the 3% of the people worth knowing aren’t worth sitting and watching a movie about. I don’t care about what kind of drugs Ray Charles used. I don’t care about the relationship between Johnny Cash and his dumb skank hausfrau. Why should I care about the random historical trivia associated with their lives? Would they care that I spent an afternoon eating hamburgers and watching baseball, waiting for my grandparents to awaken from their naps and stumble confused and befuddled into the living room? I doubt it. I mean, Johnny Cash and Ray Charles are dead. I don’t see them rising from the grave to hang out with me at my grandparents’ house. Although, if they did, I’m sure my grandma would make them a hamburger. She’s cool like that.

Despite the fact that I don’t particularly care for biopics, every year more and more biopics are made. Few interest me. Instead of telling some heartwarming story of a resilient boxer or a crazy mathematician, I’d prefer it if Ron Howard and his biopic-making ilk would ditch the fictionalized semi-histories and just give money to Errol Morris, allowing him to make interesting movies about fascinating, but not necessarily famous, people. That would be best for everyone.

Now, some of you idiots might be saying to yourself, “But Shawn, if you hate biopics so much, why did you watch Capote?” A valid question, although you shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that I actually watched the movie I am awesomely reviewing. Most of the time, I’m just making shit up. But in this case, I actually did rent and watch Capote. Although I’m not a huge fan of biopics, Capote was a pretty well-received flick, and I need to keep my Netflix queue full. I must rent as many movies as possible, otherwise I’m wasting money. Fortunately, Capote is not a typical biopic. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be called a biopic at all.

After watching Capote, you probably won’t know much more about Truman Capote than you did coming into the film. He’s a famous writer, lives in New York and talks funny. That’s really all you learn about him. Director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman (not the guy from Gremlins, that was Murray Futterman) avoid the tired minutiae of Capote’s life. There’s no tawdry homosexual love, no heartrending struggles with substance abuse and no fancy-pants costume balls. That’s what you might expect from a Truman Capote biopic, but it’s not what you get from Capote. That’s a good thing. A very good thing.

Instead of wasting my time with Capote’s life story, Miller and Futterman concentrate on telling the story of Capote’s finest work, In Cold Blood. While you might justifiably argue that Truman Capote’s personality was just as noteworthy as his artistic contributions, it’s still Capote’s writing that make him worth remembering. In Cold Blood is one of the 37 finest works of American literature, and even if you’re too stupid to read books, Capote gives a glimpse of In Cold Blood’s quality.

Capote basically tells the story of Truman Capote finding the story of In Cold Blood. There’s also a little bit about Harper Lee getting To Kill A Mockingbird published, but I think that’s so we “indie” film renting hipsters can feel superior by ironically chuckling at the 1960s New York literati for not fully appreciating To Kill A Mockingbird, which is also one of the 37 finest works of American literature. By telling the story of his work, the filmmakers show off a side of Capote that belies his persona. Capote shows that Truman Capote was much more than your run-of-the-mill tipsy New York City homo.

Quite possibly the best aspect of Capote is the Shakespearean in magnitude fashion in which the filmmakers present Capote at work. It’s tough to discern his motivations. Did he actually care about the murderer Perry Smith or was he using Smith to get his story? Or could it be Capote pretended to use Smith, to give himself the air of objectivity, when he really did care for Smith? Or maybe, like Hamlet, Capote was nothing more than a giant dicksmack. I think the film, assuming that the Harper Lee character is the moral tachometer of the film, tends to support my giant dicksmack angle, but any real judgement of Capote’s motivation is left up to you, the semi-literate idiot viewer.

Capote is a great movie. I was impressed at how little attention the film paid to Capote’s social life and how much attention it paid to selling the greatness of In Cold Blood. The only way it could have been any better, would have been if the film had ended with My Jenny sitting in a beanbag chair, reading In Cold Blood in its entirety. Unfortunately, My Jenny is too busy making shitty ripoffs of King Ralph to performs such tasks. Alas. But the absence of My Jenny notwithstanding, on my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give Capote five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein. I can only hope that when the inevitable Pynchon is made, the filmmakers will look to Capote for inspiration and ignore the trivial aspects of Pynchon’s Simpsons cameos and instead concentrate on the wacky slapstick hijinks that undoubtedly went along with the writing of Gravity’s Rainbow.