Re-View: Capote (2005)

Twenty years ago, in my one-paragraph review of “Capote”, I summarized the conflict of this story in this one sentence: “[Capote] needs two men to die, so he can finish a book about their death.”

Looking back, I think my summary of the movie is also a window into the dubious nature of Truman Capote’s mission in writing his non-fiction bestseller “In Cold Blood.” After all, the movie is about Capote’s struggle in writing and finishing a book. The book itself is about two men who committed an awful quadruple murder and were tried and executed for it. Neither the book nor this movie is about the family that was murdered or the community they were a part of, the town of Holcomb, Kansas. And that reality, I now have realized after twenty years, is an awful thing. The family and community experienced a horrible crime and this dilettante from New York breezed into town to write a scandalous book about it as if the topic was fit for his urbane cocktail parties. I read that book and was struck how after the first few chapters that led up to the murder, the vast majority of it was about the criminals, and in particular Perry Smith, a man that seems to have captivated Capote (played here by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) for various reasons.

Capote’s first remarks to the lead detective Alvin Dewey (played here by Chris Cooper) include the unnecessary revelation that he doesn’t care if the perpetrators are ever caught. Alvin Dewey makes a point to inform Truman that he along with the general community care quite a lot about whether the perpetrators are caught. Truman has a generally hard time with getting people in the neighborhood to talk to him. He needs to use his research assistant Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener and soon to be of To Kill a Mockingbird fame) to break the ice with people. It isn’t just that Truman has the affectation of a carefree homosexual that puts people off. In general, he doesn’t seem to understand that people may not be as interested in him as he is in himself. There is a good quote that is in every trailer to this movie in which Truman says “Ever since I was a child, folks have had me pegged because of how the way I talk, and they are always wrong.” Put in context of the scene in which is uttered though, this is a faux pas because he happens to be talking to the friend of the murdered teenage girl when he says it and the subject of the conversation was the murdered teenage girl. It simply was not the time to start talking about himself. The friend and Harper Lee look uncomfortable but politely refrain from commenting on his behavior.

There is a lot of disturbing subtext in this movie that I did not quite catch the first time around. There is far more nuance in the performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman then I remember. It really is a great performance. First, it is so against type for Phillip Seymour Hoffman who had made his name before and after playing either far looser or far more authoritative characters. If this was the only movie you had seen of this actor, you would have a dramatically wrong idea of his normal range. Second, the way he plays Truman fits into the ambiguous way the movie itself shows his actions. The movie is directed by Bennett Miller who appears to take stances on Capote’s behavior in dribs and drabs, never really playing his hand as to whether he is sympathetic to him or not. It isn’t all that clear whether or not Capote should be helping the criminals. Or whether or not he is helping the criminals sincerely or to just help the dramatic unfolding of his book. Did he fall in love with Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), or simply identify with him as someone from a similar background, or is he simply using him. He is never directly confronted about his motivations. Ultimately, the men are scheduled for execution and the end (their lives, his book) is finally in sight. There is this extraordinary scene where Truman Capote visits the men immediately before they are hanged and experiences a very tightly wound emotional breakdown. The situation at that point is so complicated that it is impossible to unwind all of the contradictory elements of it. And yet it is emotionally real. All explanations can be found in the choices of the actor. Phillip Seymour Hoffman would go on to win the Oscar for this movie, and as I recall, it wasn’t really a contest. This is arguably the best performance of Hoffman who was arguably the best actor of his time (say 1995-2015). I still miss him.

The Director Bennett Miller is himself a bit of a cypher. Capote was his first feature film and he would go on to direct two others, 2011’s Moneyball and 2014’s Foxcatcher. Then apparently he decided he didn’t want to make movies anymore. It is rare that a person makes three feature films, all of which garner multiple Oscar nominations, and then doesn’t work again. His style doesn’t draw attention to the man behind the camera, instead it focuses on the acting which is allowed to breathe and develop. His movies are notable in that they feature some of the best acting in the careers of the actors in them, Hoffman in Capote, Jonah Hill and Brad Pitt in Moneyball, and Steve Carell and Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher.

When I first saw this movie in 2005, I didn’t quite get the scene near the mid-part of the movie where Alvin Dewey sits across from Truman and takes an understated midwestern umbrage to Truman’s efforts to help the criminals appeal their sentence on the grounds of inadequate counsel. If these men are freed because of his meddling, the Dewey informs Capote, “I’m going to go to Brooklyn and hunt you down.” I think I get it now. 

The utility of the death penalty does not lie in deterrence. Counterintuitively, people do not fear death. Instead they fear suffering. (This is what was learned by the many policy attempts to stop people from smoking. By far, it was more effective to show an alive person dealing with a hole in their throat than showing statistics about deaths from lung cancer.) And suffering, at least the cruel and unusual kind, is unconstitutional. No, the utility of the death penalty lies in its finality. It allows the community to move on and assuages the very natural impulse of human beings towards retribution and revenge. The state takes on that responsibility so the individual does not have to. Here we see Truman Capote suffer because it takes years for the two men's appeals to be exhausted before their execution. Imagine for a moment, how that same stay of execution affected the people who knew the murdered family and mourned their deaths. For that reason, it should remain, but used sparingly only for the commission of shocking crimes and only if there is no doubt at all as to guilt of the perpetrators.

Unfortunately this is not how the death penalty is used. Instead, it is used as leverage for negotiation (i.e. a criminal will escape the penalty if they plead guilty) making its general application only in those cases where the facts are hotly contested (i.e. the suspects plead innocent) and which require a trial. I say, if you need a trial to figure out what happened and who was responsible, then you shouldn’t apply the death penalty regardless of the outcome. And if there is no doubt that these two particular men decided to break into a house and murder a family of four for no particular reason, then they shouldn’t be allowed to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty. Any argument that we shouldn’t have a death penalty because we are too civilized for it seems to me to be an argument from vanity which doesn’t take into account the details of the crime in question nor its effects on the larger community. But I digress. This movie isn’t about the victims.

Here is link to my original review:

https://maxsminimoviemagazine.blogspot.com/2010/10/capote-112005.html

Beau is Afraid (5/5 Stars)

 

Something that I have gleaned from watching a lot of movies is that human beings have nostalgia for the culture of their youth. It is an entirely normal thing to be convinced that the movies that came out, the music that was around, and the games that were played were some of the best. It has dawned on me that I am an exception to this rule. Indeed, looking back at American culture over a long period of time, I’m pretty sure my teenage years 1996-2006 were the nadir of American culture. It was a time of turnover in the culture, when the last taboos of obscenity and language were being violated in ever increasing numbers, when alternative music devolved into emo/grunge/nu metal, when pop music corporatized itself into boy bands. When my parents were teenagers, they had The Beatles. I had Eminem. (I suppose I could have felt different if I had HBO back then, but I didn’t). The worst part though is what happened to the horror genre in movies. The breakdown of standards concerning violence in movies (thx Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Tarantino’s Kill Bill) led to a free for all that culminated in what was being called “torture porn.” It seemed like all the creativity in the genre was focused on finding new and excruciating ways to mutilate, dismember, and (hopefully) kill characters.

Enough time has passed that we can perhaps look back at that time as a time of puberty, when you drank way too much just so you could know what it was like, but now that you are older, and have already done it, you don’t need to do it again. The horror genre in the last decade has revitalized itself. Since all the taboos as to violence have been broken many times over, creators of good horror films have needed to become creative once again as to how to scare us. And step up they have, none more so than the writer/director Ari Aster. His previous movies include Hereditary and Midsommar. And now here is Beau is Afraid. It is a three hour long odyssey and I spent a majority of its time traumatized.

There is a fundamental difference between the films of Ari Aster and the awful horror movies of my youth. I am convinced that the only way one can watch Saw or its many sequels is to detach themselves from the movie and consider it without any empathy or sympathy, much like someone would watch a geek show at the circus (a thing where a homeless man would bite the heads off of chickens, or so I’m told). In contrast, although Ari Aster’s films have strong horror elements (there is some type of witch’s coven in Hereditary and a forest cult in Midsommar), it is impossible to not be drawn into the story and the characters. Watching Hereditary, the most memorable scene takes place at the dinner table and involves Toni Collete yelling at her son. Toni Collette isn’t possessed in this scene. It’s all raw earned emotion. In Midsommar, there is a scene that may well be placed in the dictionary as the ultimate example of catharsis. A young woman discovers that her boyfriend is cheating on her. The other women in the community help her get it all out. The scene ends with them all screaming together in a barn.

The screening I attended of Beau if Afraid involved a question and answer session with Ari Aster. In this session, our writer/director described Beau is Afraid as a comedy. If it is a comedy, it is much like the “comedies” of Martin Scorsese. I'm thinking particularly of After Hours. Scorsese’s notion of humor was to fling as many terrible things as possible upon an entirely innocent man (it’s a great movie, I recommend it). Beau is Afraid is like that, but the things that happen to Beau are much worse.

Beau is played by Joaquin Phoenix. He lives in a nightmare city, on a block full of urban terror. The neighbors accuse him of playing loud music when he is not playing any music. Grotesque graffiti lines the walls. Crazy, half-deranged people, some of them presently being violent, inhabit his street. And they are not going away. They inhabit his street. When Beau ventures out of his home to the corner deli, this horde of deranged people take the opportunity to break into Beau’s apartment where they party all night long and destroy the place.

This is in the first twenty minutes of the movie. What is extraordinary about Beau is Afraid is that the preceding paragraph is not a dream. That is, at no point does Beau wake up and realize that some of the above did not happen. Nor does the above seem to be some sort of psychological condition within Beau, wherein the crazy people are the delusions of a schizophrenic or agoraphobic. There is no point in the story where someone shakes Beau and tells him that he’s imagining all of this crazy shit. It is happening. There really is a serial killer known as the naked stabber, a deranged man that runs around town naked stabbing people. He stabs Beau. He does. That is why Beau is walking around with bandages for the next two thirds of the movie. And the bathtub scene. Apparently that too is real.

Ari Aster brings a technical mastery to what is being shown. The movie is composed of long shots with incredible framing of background detail and extras. The sound design is doing funky things too. All of it combines into this phantasmagorical hellscape. The scary things aren’t vampires or zombies. They are things that are familiar to you: your mother, the police, drugs, sex, your therapist, teenage girls. In a flashback, Beau’s mother tells him that he inherited a particular thing from his father which is arguably the worst possible thing a mother could say to a son. Alfred Hitchcock would have loved this movie. Martin Scorsese wrote the forward for the Midsommar DVD box set. If nothing else can be said, Ari Aster is an excellent filmmaker.

It must take an extraordinary amount of confidence/resolve for a movie to show what it is showing and not blink. To not, at some point say, okay I’m drawing the line here, and that last part was just for fun. But as far as I can tell, this happens just once and it happens only to make things worse, not better, and that is in the last twenty minutes of the movie. If I had one qualm about the movie is that I would take away that one blink and see where the movie goes without it. This is a movie like Under the Silver Lake that I felt was within reach of being perfect if only it could have reworked some of its scenes.

At the screening I asked Ari Aster the following questions.

What did you mother think of this movie?

Did she think it was funny?

Once you see it, ask me how he responded.

Bridge of Spies (4/5 Stars)

Steven Spielberg has been around so long now that it is fair to say that his style isn’t like old school filmmaking as much as it is old school filmmaking. His fluid framing, the polish of the dialogue, and the frequency of virtuous themes represent the Platonic ideal all other filmmaking either imitate, elaborate upon, or reject. “Bridge of Spies,” has all the hallmarks of a very by the book movie. There are no missteps mainly because the movie takes very few chances. If you are acquainted with Spielberg, you will recognize a lot of his signature moves that he has already proven are effective in many other movies. “Bridge of Spies” is the safest movie in theaters right now. I doubt there will be many people who won’t like it. But isn't like this is Spielberg's best movie as much as it feels like a breather between great movies.

“Bridge of Spies,” is a historical period piece set in the Cold War late 1950s about an admirable man named James Donovan. He was an insurance lawyer who was summoned to represent in court a captured soviet spy named Rudolph Abel (played by Mark Rylance). Nobody really wants Abel to not be anything other than guilty but at the same time there is this whole American Constitution thing and everybody deserves a capable defense. Donovan proves capable enough to save his client from execution.

Then things take an interesting turn when an American spy named Francis Gary Powers is shot down over Russia. Donovan is called upon to negotiate an exchange of spies. This will all know from our history books, he succeeds at doing. What makes this story new (and probably why Spielberg chose to make a movie about it) is the revelation that Donovan went out of his way to also exchange a release of an American student named Prior from East Germany at the same time. The U.S. government really doesn’t care whether the student gets released as long as Powers comes back so Donovan’s mission is entirely altruistic and self-imposed. He is in fact negotiating not only with the Soviets, the East Germans, but also the C.I.A. And he deserves every bit the title of master negotiator. Donovan is played by Tom Hanks perfectly cast as a smart idealistic American everyman.

The movie is but a series of conversations and it is to the credit of Spielberg and the writers (which happen to include Joel and Ethan Coen) that there is an intriguing amount of trick storytelling that interrupt the what could have been easily stale scenes. Actually we can look a little further into some specific scenes because it is a really good example of superior filmmaking. Take for instance the scene where James Donovan brings up the idea of representing the spy to his wife and children around the dinner table. What needs to happen in this scene is he has to tell his wife about the case and she has to voice the reasons not to do it: social shame, helping the soviets, somebody else’s problem, etc. The scene has a subplot to it. In the previous scene Donovan has his assistant cancel a dinner date to work late on the new case (it is after all just a Tuesday.) At the family dinner Donovan’s daughter reveals that she was just stood up by her boyfriend. It becomes clear that the daughter and the assistant are dating but Donovan doesn’t know it. This is pretty funny and is good for a couple of laughs. Now the interesting part: the scene ends and the daughter and the assistant are never heard from again in the entire movie. That is to say the subplot is a red herring whose sole function is to provide some laughs during the dinner table scene not because these are important characters. Or take the scene where Donovan meets the East German ambassador for the first time. The ambassador pours two drinks while his back is to Donovan. He turns around with the two glasses. The camera tilts down to look at the glasses and then tilts back up to see Hanks’ quizzical expression. This camera move and the expressions stereotypically imply that the drink might be poisoned. The drink isn’t poisoned and there will never be a poisoning in the movie but Speilberg inserted those moves in for purposes of suspense for the sake of suspense. After all the audience does not know whether the drink is poisoned (or whether the previously mentioned romantic subplot goes anywhere) so it does not really matter whether it is or not as long as the audience feels that it might be for a moment and becomes more involved in the scene. This sort of thing shows off Spielberg’s knowledge of a movie audience's general attention span. Right when a talking scene might start to get boring he will figure out a way to instill some suspense or some joke whether it has anything to do with the storyline or not and it always works. 

 

One more thing should get some notice and that is the performance of Mark Rylance as the Soviet spy Rudolph Abel. He underplays the role in such a sublime way that it becomes almost comedic. He is not afraid of the U.S. government as much as he is just resigned to everything. He does not particularly care whether he gets a defense or not. At one point he comments, “The boss is not always right, but he is always the boss.” What an incredibly Soviet thing to say. Whereas when an injustice happens to an American he may actually get mad about it or worry about the outcome. The difference I suppose is that in America our ideals and rights give us hope that justice may prevail and so a fight for justice is worth it. 

Why do I feel like somebody is trying to teach me something. Anyway good movie, Dad. 

Birdman (5/5 Stars)

Or: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance

When Roger Ebert came upon a long shot in a movie he applied the Goodfellas standard to it. This standard referred to Martin Scorsese’s famous shot of Henry Hill taking out his girlfriend to the local nightclub. The shot starts with Hill handing his car keys to the valet and then taking his girl past the long line outside the club into a backdoor through the kitchen (he slips several guys $20 each) and into the main club area where the proprietor brings out a special table just for him and plants it in the front right next to the band. Hill sits down and his friends at the next table buy him a bottle of wine. The shot ends at 3 minutes 13 seconds. Subsequent filmmakers, inspired by Goodfellas, attempted such long shots of their own and Ebert was continually dismayed by what he saw. The copycats got the technicalities correct but missed the point. What made the long shot in Goodfellas great was not that it took a lot of skill and coordination to pull it off (it did), but that it was the correct way to tell the story. Scorsese was relating to the audience how Henry Hill’s position in the mafia opened doors to him that were closed to regular people. The best way to show that would be how quickly he could get a seat in a crowded at the Copacabana in real time. Add on that the song that played over the entire shot, The Crystal’s “Then He Kissed Me,” and the audience also gets a great idea of how his girlfriend felt about the whole thing, i.e. she was super impressed by it. The long shot in Goodfellas is not a showoffy ‘look what I can do with a camera’ conceit. It is the story. That is what makes a long shot great or not great. After all if just making the shooting process as hard as possible were what made it great, then Hitchcock’s “Rope” is the king of long shots (the entire 90 minute movie only has four takes). But it isn’t and you don't really need to see “Rope.” Hitchcock was just playing around with his camera to see if he could do it. There was no reason that movie needed to be told that way.

Which brings us to Director Alejandro Innaritu and Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s “Birdman,” which is not unlike Rope. I mention the cinematographer because he happens to be the best in the business. He works with Terrance Malick (Tree of Life and To the Wonder) and Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men and Gravity) and this is not the first time he has worked in incredibly long shots. In other movies though the long shots generally concerned action scenes. (The point of long shots in action scenes is to give a more realistic ‘you are there!’ momentum to what is happening on the screen. If you have ever seen ‘Children of Men’ and ‘Gravity’ you will know what I mean.) But ‘Birdman’ is not an action movie. It is a story about Riggan Thompson a washed up movie star who was last culturally relevant a quarter century ago when he played the very popular comic book character ‘Birdman.’ He enjoyed great success as ‘Birdman’ but soon became unable to do anything else. When he refused to do “Birdman 4,” his career went down the tubes. Now he is staging an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” on Broadway. He is desperately trying to become a serious artist again and is fighting against the widespread notion that he is a cartoon character and can’t be anything else.

Now why does this need to be shot in one continuous long shot (It is and it is very technically impressive but nevermind let’s apply the Goodfellas standard). Well, the surprise answer is something I have never seen a long shot in a movie ever accomplish. Surprisingly the way the long shots in this movie are used, they actually take the focus off of what the director is doing and allow the audience to focus much more on the actors. It is really kind of exhilarating. Wactching ‘Birdman,’ a movie about people putting on a play, actually feels like a play. It is even written like a play. By that I mean that characters provide through dialogue much more exposition than usual and at other times go into emotional monologues and speeches at length the way that is generally impossible in movie time. You may have noticed that a three hour play basically feels the same length as a two-hour movie. The whole ‘being there’ aspect of a play elongates the audience’s patience whereas movies generally need to move much faster. But here, because of the extraordinarily skilfull camera of Lubezki, the momentum of the long take gives the actors far more leeway for dramatic performances. And boy, do the cast in the movie rise to the occasion. There is some serious throw down acting in this movie and it occurs all the way through it.

Anchoring the movie as Riggan Thomas is none other than Michael Keaton who if you remember him at all you probably remember him as the Tim Burton era Batman. The role is so perfectly tailored to Keaton’s life (his career did have a downturn after he stopped being Batman) that it provokes the question of whether the movie was inspired by him. Probably not but he is the perfect casting decision on paper and it turns out as well in practice. It is a great performance and should be a cinch for an Oscar nomination. Certainly nobody this year has done “more” acting in a movie. Playing against him as his main antagonist (among many) is Edward Norton as one of those crazy method ‘actors’ that throw fits when they drink water instead of gin in a scene when they are supposed to be drinking f*cking gin. Then there is Zach Galifinakis as Riggan’s best friend, agent, and producer. Zach plays the sane one in this movie, a choice that reminded me of the casting of Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The movie is crazy, so why not cast a crazy comedian as the serious one. It works. I liked it. Rounding out the cast is Naomi Watts (a long time actress and newcomer to Broadway), Emma Stone (who has huge eyes), Andrea Riseborough, and Amy Ryan (divorcee of Riggan). All of them do good jobs even if they don’t get the really big moments like for instance running through Times Square in only underwear with a marching band in the distance. Someone does that, won’t tell you who.

‘Birdman’ is a seamless auditory and visual experience. There is an element of magic in the movie that is not fully explained but after awhile does not really need to be. It feels correct and is fairly understood as an extension of the scene’s emotional tone. There are plenty of details that lend to the overall otherworldliness of the movie. A couple of great ones cherry picked from the movie include the fog machines, the Christmas lights at the liquor store, a Japanese critic, and a certain quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth at precisely the right time. Birdman is a must see movie. It is one of the best of the year and should at least net Lubezki’s 2^nd Oscar in as many years.

Capote 11/20/05

This movie doesn't waste time with subplots. It's all about Capote. In a way that's refreshing, because he is, after all, the most interesting character. Played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a performance that's bound to garner attention, Capote is a small, high pitched man. He is strong in many ways, and weak in many others. During this story he will come into a crisis, that he never recovered from. He needs two men to die, so he can finish a book about their death. He also is in love with one of them. He can save them if he tries, but he doesn't. The book becomes a best seller, and he becomes a wreck. The tragedy is real in this story. I'm seriously thinking about reading his book "IN Cold Blood" now. The movie has me curiously hooked.