Watched Capote

With intrepid curiousity I watched the movie Capote. Here was a famous writer I had only a whisper of contact with in another book. In an strange book I can barely remember the title, Immortality was in the title and the cover was purple, ahh thats right it was A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection. Anyway again from the little I can remember it was a strange, strange, strange book which made my stomach swim but it did have an insight about Truman Capote. In the book (and Wikipedia will confirm) chameleons do not usually change their colour for camflouge, its more to do with temperature and communication. The book said Capote was this kind of chameleon, he was someone who changed his colour for the occasion and temperature, always luminously standing out and communicating to the world.

Throughout the film, we see Capote display exactly this characteristic. We see him the centre of attention with socialites, then changing to an empathetic centre of understanding when he and Harper Lee are interviewing a girl, finally we see him on the one hand friends and almost in love with the prisoner to wishing him to die. These colours as you probably ascertained are the different aspects of Truman Capote. The film creates a moving account because it reveals these subtle contradictions and complex emotions like a real human being. The actual film raw information is simple, dull, Capote goes around talking to people about these murders and then talking to the sensitive murderer about his life and feelings. The film is called Capote and thats what its really all about, giving us a sense of Capote and his complexities. Whether its a historically accurate sense of Capote is another question completely. I will seek to answer later when I read Capotes books as I think this is where much of the characater of a good writer is found.