Capote *** 1/2 out of ****

The Fall of Man...in the fall of a man

"Capote" is an excellent, disturbing analysis of darkness touring, at first unwittingly, then compulsively and destructively, the most pitiful district of its large precinct, running its hand over the contours of a neighborhood polar opposite to the martini Saturday nights in uptown Manhattan and finding it equally rife with desolation and ruthlessness. The uplift of it? There is no uplift. It is a straight, fierce double shot of grain liquor. Some artists grope around in the abyss, are pulled in, and do not fully return. Franz Kafka. Sam Peckinpah. Vincent Van Gogh. John Kennedy Toole. Jackson Pollock. And Truman Capote, who wrote harmless society novels and larks for The New Yorker before he stumbled upon an item in the New York Times about a murdered family in a west Kansas farmhouse.

He would go there for a magazine piece. Six years later he would produce "In Cold Blood," still a titan of non-fiction and the treadmill for the true-crime section genre, Court TV, the Amber Alert, all of it. Director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman don't rehash the book - Richard Brooks' 1967 film does that fine. Instead, they follow Capote as he researches, writes, gloats, abuses his subjects - convicted murderers Perry Smith and Richard Hickok - drinks, smokes, and generally dissolves from the pressure of his talent and conflicted guilt over the impending deaths of the killers. Philip Seymour Hoffman, as Capote, covers the journey as if he was born to it, effortlessly channeling the man's charm, malice and tunnel ambition, not to mention his speech and mannerisms. By movie's end you loathe and pity Capote precisely because he has the capacity for scruples, and he pitches them.

In his New York fishbowl Capote holds court. In Holcomb, Kan., where Smith and Hickok murdered the Clutter family, he uses his novelist friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) as a frontwoman into the homes of reluctant witnesses and police investigator Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper). It works. In these scenes Capote is his usual storytelling self on a four or five, and he is very good at working over regular folks with stories of Bogart and Marilyn. He changes the day Smith and Hickok are captured and he meets Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) in the kitchen of the sheriff's apartment, in the women's holding cell.

"He's a goldmine," Capote tells his friend Lee of Smith, a shy, tortured soul taken to Capote as a dog to a benevolent master.

And because of it, Capote fights to save both killers from the death penalty until he can convince Smith to talk about the night of the murders. Until their hanging would better serve the ending of his book. By the hour of their execution in a warehouse behind Leavenworth prison, Capote has slipped into a basket of acute alcoholism, self-aggrandizement and persecution complex. Most authors stretch recollected truth; Capote's predicament is worse that he is an integral part of the truth. The fact of his book and the lives of those in it reverse priorities.

The movie has an elegant, unhurried construction toward the moment Capote sees his subjects for the last time just before midnight. Miller inserts scenes of the winter Kansas prairie for emotional effect and structural progress - a shot of a distant passenger train sliding along the plains echoes Terrence Malick - while his interiors are cloaked in shadows and dimly-lit, stripped of their vibrancy; save a short interlude at Capote's home in Spain, the director works in blacks, grays, hunter greens, washed-out prison blues.

Hoffman's dandy aside, the performances suit the tone. Keener's Harper Lee is steady, sage and close to saintly; she emerges as a bit of a cipher for Miller and Futterman's analysis of the lead character; in most scenes it's hard to tell whether she's Capote's friend or his philosophical foil Likewise Bruce Greenwood as author Jack Dunphy, Capote's lover. Cooper, as Alvin Dewey, maintains that talent of holding contempt and affection in the same moment while Collins plays Smith as a man who seems like a perfectly unfortunate soul before and after the hour he shot four people in the head.