Capote's Dilemma

How does literature effectively translate into film? Many of us have been disappointed by this endeavor: I may be going against the Academy, but One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest does not sufficiently capture the essence of the novel. The reversal process has proved equally frustrating: watching Requiem for a Dream and then reading Hubert Selby’s fare was anticlimactic. The most pressing problem for film adaptation is consolidation. How can a writer shape a 300+ page novel into a 100+ page screenplay? Does it tell the same story? Surely it must be told in a different way, e.g., highly imagistic, more reliant upon dialogue. The narrative voice is rarely articulated in a voice-over that does not misfit the tone and seriousness of a movie.

Enter 2005’s film, Capote. It traces the five-year journey of the celebrated author researching and writing In Cold Blood, a one-of-a-kind novel about the nonsensical murder of a well-respected family in a small Kansas town. Truman Capote’s incongruity of personality with the conservative community is reconciled with the help of his friend and colleague, Harper Lee. Due to the rapport Capote builds with the community, once the two suspects are captured, he is able to gain unprecedented access to them, garnering the bulk of material for his novel. For all the literati out there, during Capote’s creative/destructive process, Harper Lee’s rise to fame occurs with the advent of her [children’s] novel and subsequent film, To Kill a Mockingbird.

The novel and film complement each other tremendously: where the novel is silent, the film speaks. In Cold Blood invests a considerable amount of attention to setting up the family and their community while the remainder of the novel is mostly concerned with the drawn-out capture of the killers. In comparison, the film opens with the discovery of the dead family, followed by Capote’s first investigation, and then skips ahead to the capture of the killers. From that point, the film spends most of its time building the relationship between Capote and the murderer, Perry Smith. In contrast to the distance Capote maintains in the novel, the film portrays the agony he undergoes through aiding Perry in the appeals process while desiring for the executions to be carried out so that he could conclude his novel. On several occurrences, Capote manipulates Perry to obtain the information he needs to write his novel. The film succeeds much in the same way the novel does: it shows the humanity of such an inhumane person, without excusing his actions, and questions popular notions of judgment and justice. In this case, Capote stands as the accused man. He defends himself to Lee: “There wasn't anything I could have done to save them.” A relentless friend (they grew up together as neighbors), she tells him: “Maybe not. But the fact is, you didn't want to.”

The director, Bennett Miller, has responded to claims that the film is shot “sedately” because of the gray color theme and little camera movement. He argues that the film was shot with composure in a way that sensitizes the audience, heightening awareness of each scene. His artistic choice is matched by the sparseness of the shooting location, Canada, which evokes a bleak, autumnal Kansan landscape perfectly. With this background, the movie resonates strongly in its most subtle moments. For example, Capote talks with Lee about Perry, stating, “It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day he stood up and went out the back door, while I went out the front.”

The whispering undertone of the novel becomes an overarching voice upon watching the film. Capote’s ambition for In Cold Blood is astonishing for both admirable and despicable qualities: it is a groundbreaking but egocentric affair. The film beautifully illustrates why he never completed another novel, explaining the profound epigraph to his following incomplete project: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” The two works combine to tell a lasting story that few novel-film pairs have ever achieved.