The Two Lives of Truman Capote

It was either my junior or senior year of high school english when we had to read Truman Capote's nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. I'd heard of him, but prior to reading this book, Capote was merely a amusignly flaboyant pop figure who occassionally made appearances on The Tonight Show. 

Upon reading the compelling true crime novel about the gruesome, random murder of the entire Clutter family, I was perplexed. How could this amazing work have been written by someone I'd seen as no deeper than a tidepool?

Bennett Miller's Capote takes up this point exactly, showing us the dual life of Truman Capote during the time when he was writing In Cold Blood, between 1959 and 1965. Dan Futterman's script focuses entirely on this period in Truman's life, a time that must have been extremely confusing for him. 

He'd already written all the books he'd ever complete, other than In Cold Blood, had a movie made from Breakfast at Tiffany's, and was enjoying the New York social scene, where his every anecdote was celebrated as genius. But the decision to pursue what was first to be a New Yorker article about the murders, changed Capote's life. 

The article turned into a book when Capote saw just how much material there was to work with. In the course of researching the book, Capote befriended the two killers, Dick Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.), crossing a line every journalist dares not cross. 

The conflict between using his subjects to create an amazing book that defined a whole new genre - "creative nonfiction" - and developing a friendship and identification with Perry in particular, is Capote's downfall. In fact, as the film points out, he never completed another book after "In Cold Blood," and after witnessing the executions (at Perry's request), he was emotionally scarred for life.