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SEE AND WATCH BEST of NATALIE PORTMAN
Capote, 2005 Synopsis: Truman Capote (Hoffman), during his research for his book In Cold Blood, an account of the murder of a Kansas family, the writer develops a close relationship with Perry Smith, one of the killers Review: When he was apprised that Hollywood was making not one, but TWO films based on the almost true life of Truman Capote, his long time rival Gore Vidal is supposed to have said, “AH, yes, …” one could imagine the patrician airs which have looked down on poor dirt footed hillbillies like Truman since the days of marble, “I see that America has finally found its own Dante.” This is an example of Gores perfect refined wit, and use of a kind of comparison by way of ridicule which is a lost Jesuit art, and which can not be replicated now in our days of bitchy schoolgirls, using fake my space pages sending girls to their own slaughter. Gore didn’t like this ball of lies called Capote, and though the film was meant to be seen as what Gore himself titled Hagiography or modern saint worship-painting, our Fra Angelico of them all was done no favors by this film in the elast.
Always preciously hung between celebrity and writer, and actually wanting to be more a writer than some old hag’s boy escort, Capote was always someone I liked, and often found Gore to be the bully here, a bully which wasn’t really needed. I liked Truman. I liked his florid, overwrought, southern antebellum style , especially as the then publishing industry was just then starting to make everything sound as thought it was written by sixth grade graduate white women. That early selling out to the women of the suburbs would find its lowest points when Oprah’s book club designation was decried by authors who made fun of it, and still eagerly wanted that imprimatur displayed over their own unrecalled , remarkable faces if need be. I liked his lyrical ness band his playfulness, as he did seem a rolly polly Puck let lose amid the last dying empire and its last dying salons. And, his end proved that, despite all he might have been to be seen as , in the end , it was a writer and as a reporter pf things and not as another gadfly or another Oscar Wilde Fairy who flit and danced on small feet for the crowd amusement was what he wished to truly be.. I believe he even SAID THAT HE WAS SHOCKED BY THE RESPONSE of his last work, in which he divulged their tawdry , silly, petty , hardly patrician, secrets, as he felt as a writer, or an observer, he was entitled to use anything observed, and for that matter, who would be stupid enough to tell anything to a writer and think one day it wouldn’t be starting back at you. I have always felt badly for Capote and his end, and though I did look forwards to seeing at least one of the canticles being made to the fallen saint of West central park drive, I didn’t much care for it, and I was not sure why. The days of actors, actually creating roles are long gone, as Michelangelo once said when not doing a perfect rendition of a Medici’s visage for a tomb, who will ever think to recall what he looked like anyway….? But, in today’s Hollywood, chameleons are all, and acting is something they can do with make up and lighting, anything but acting, and certainly anything but creating a caricature. The recent king of fake shnoozes as acting, a three named creature from a tropical forest in a joke by the affack duck, F Murray Hoffman, or something like that, took great pains to be an even more effeminate Truman than I had recalled him even being. He was as effeminate and as lethargic and as wispy and as lugubrious as a beloved Tennessee heroine, always looking feh da kinnness ah strangahs….I even excepted him to blush and then faint, screaming at dem yankeahhes. Wow. There was a smarminess and a, well, Bette Davis impersonator quality to the role which, at least to me, was off putting. Recently, a busty starlet named Jennifer Love Hewitt placed in a televised bio-pic, --she must be harder to imitate or is more forgotten—of Audrey Hepburn. And in the Breakfast at tiffany’s parts of the
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