It's day four of the NYFF press grind proper, and the drones are getting restless.

I blog all morning on Thursday and then make the trek to Lincoln Center, arriving about ten minutes before the 2pm screening of Capote. The auditorium is pretty packed and I take the first seat I see, in the back row, in between a batch of gossipy critics. Most of the people I talk to are on their second, if not third screening of the day; no one is in a particularly good mood. Early buzz on Capote is that it's this year's Ray - in other words, sure to be heavily pushed at Oscar time, but unfortunately unremarkable save for Philip Seymour Hoffman's facsimile-style performance as the titular writer/gin-soaked gadabout.

One guy I talk seems to resent the fact that he has to go through the motions of the screening to follow. His grumbles are met with sympathy from all in earshot. I don't mean to bitch about this job of mine, but the simple fact is that professional festival going is hard work. After several days of seeing several films a day, not only are most of us physically and mentally wiped out, but there comes a point where it becomes hard to trust one's own considered opinion. It's all part of the dangerous business of Festival Logic, in which the panning or celebration of any individual film has a great deal to do with what screened before and after it, as well as other variables, such as the temperature of the screening room, the availability of coffee in the press room, and, at the more social festivals, factors like which critic made the morning screening and which one was too hungover from staying too late at which distributor's party the night before. "Buzz" therefore becomes like a virus of misinformation, the result of an experiment too contaminated by outside variables to trust. The only thing to do is to try to ignore it and go with your gut.

That said, my instant reaction to Capote is that it's a tragic squandering of material that could have been devastating. Philip Seymour Hoffman is great, but his schtick becomes grating. It's a disappointment.



Ryan will be reviewing Capote for us next week, so I don't want to say too much and necessarily set his review up as a rebuttal. I will say that the press in attendence yesterday audibly sighed, groaned, and squirmed throughout. This could be the Festival Logic talking, but Capote felt like a real chore to sit through. Less than a third of the crowd stayed for the half-hearted press conference.

Dan Futterman's screenplay spends far too much time rehashing the content and questions of In Cold Blood, when it should be delving deeper into the devastating contradictions within the writer himself. Capote develops a bond with one of the killers that, early on, looks an awful lot like romantic obsession. It fades like a hard, fast crush, and the prison-bound Perry is left wondering what happened, whilst everyone else wonders if Truman's affection was ever really real. Capote speaks of a kind of primal bond with Perry, and yet he's undeniably manipulating him. Everyone in Capote's (criminally underrepresented) social circle keeps promising him the finished book is going to make him a legend; he needs to get to the point where he can cash in on those predictions, but he can't until the friend that he supposedly cares for deeply is executed.

Such contradictions are potentially fascinating, but under the direction of Bennett Miller, they're navigated inexpertly. “On the one hand,” said Miller at the press conference following the film, “it’s about a guy writing his masterpiece, and at the same time he’s having a very private tragedy.” He’s right, but I think perhaps the film interprets the tragedy too privately, so that there’s too much doubt as to whether or not it’s actually there. I'd say that if Miller made one fatal mistake, it was the liberal injection of the kind straight-faced genius talk that AMPAS loves to see in a biopic. Truman Capote was many things, but he was never the hero that this film occasionally implies. With the exception of a shot or two of a gin bottle on his writing desk, there's next to zero examination of Capote's actual work or writing process, and we're left to wonder how the writer makes the leap from swanning center of attention at so many cocktail parties, to genuinely respected literary giant. We’re just meant to understand that genius is happening somehow, somewhere off camera; we’re essentially just supposed to take William Shawn’s word for it.

An awful lot of screen time is devoted to the frankly boring question of "what happened" on the night of the murders. But why tread and retread over this territory? The most interesting thing about Capote, and this era of his life and work, is that the guy was a social monster, all but insufferable to anyone who cared about him, in his own way as much of a terror as the murderers he's exploiting for the meat of his masterpiece.

The film is visually striking, with the vast landscapes of Kansas and the Manhattan skyline both reduced to 2-D flatness in a mute palette occasionally struck with warm gold and electric blue. Miller explained that aesthetically he was going for a style like “prose, [an] austere style, using a simple, visual vocabulary.”

Hoffman joined Miller and Philip Lopate afterwards for the press conference, and if there was any doubt in the crowd as to the quality of Hoffman's performance, it was wiped out by the actor’s real-life casually crushing masculinity. Asked about his research process, he said, “[Capote] was one of the most elusive people you could imagine.” He explained that he’d lock himself into a room for an hour or two a day in order to sink into “a state of self-criticism that was unbearable for a long period of time…and what happened in that room is really a much longer dinner discussion, [to be had] naked, by a pool … but that’s basically what I did.”