In Cold Capote
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On the Town
Film festivals are like funerals: As soon as one door closes, another one opens. Before I’ve even unpacked from a punishing ordeal of physical and mental exhaustion (not to mention eye strain) at last week’s 30th annual movie marathon in Toronto, the 43rd New York Film Festival is upon us. The differences are vast and obvious: Toronto spreads more than 350 films over a sprawling metropolitan city, while only 25 features and a handful of sidebar events comprise the New York City fête at Lincoln Center, where the whole thing takes place in two rooms.
Still, there is one similarity: With good films in short supply, almost everything in New York was shown in Toronto. Proving a point, I guess, that there isn’t enough product to go around. But what there is, as Spencer Tracy said, perusing Kate Hepburn’s bones, is “cherce.”
Apologetically, and with malice toward none, I still believe the snobbish, insular, little New York Film Festival has traditionally been an elitist event programmed to flatter the most ingrained segment of a self-regarding clique suffering from delusions of grandeur, showing movies of maximum pretentiousness and minimal significance, whether the public wants to see them or not. This year is an improvement, with more versatility in the choice of selections and more tickets made available for most performances half an hour before the feature times, if you’re willing to stand in line at the box office for last-minute cancellations—a piece of advice I urge you to follow for several films of exceptional quality and one or two with Academy Awards in their future. Time to give credit where credit is deserved (and overdue). From what I’ve seen, this will be a standout year.
At the top of your must-see list, make every effort to discover what the tidal wave of advance critical praise for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s impersonation of the late Truman Capote in Capote is all about. Some actors take on roles for attention, controversy and prizes. But Mr. Hoffman doesn’t just play the brilliant, mincing, courageous, fearless, sensitive, stylish, two-faced, self-promoting literary chameleon, social butterfly and distinguished author of a dozen of the best-written books of the past 50 years. He morphs into the man himself. Lisping, muttering with his tongue between his teeth while rubbing his upper eyelid (a mannerism even Robert Morse never got right in the one-man Broadway play Tru), pursuing a story like a pit bull, and taking on the sacred cows of society and publishing with venomous vigor, Mr. Hoffman not only looks like Truman: He is Truman. He obviously watched the old talk shows and read Gerald Clarke’s book about Capote, which provided the film with entertaining anecdotes, but this is far from a TV profile on Biography. Truman was no saint, and this is no snow job. Mr. Hoffman carefully calibrates the details with sad, graphic, warts-and-all acuity. You can’t help but respect the diminutive writer’s huge talent, but the only person who would probably like Truman as a human being at the end of Capote is Truman himself.
The movie is not a life story; it only focuses on the four years it took Truman to research, write and publish In Cold Blood—from the gruesome 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Kansas that shocked a nation, to the execution of the killers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith (for whom Truman developed an unrequited emotional attachment), at which the author was present. The movie covers much of the same ground as Richard Brooks’ classic 1967 film, without the meticulous details, detouring from the real story to spotlight the agonizing creative process the author endured. Still, the random observations are curiously effective. Truman in the Kansas wheat fields in a floor-length camel-hair coat and a flowing scarf from Bergdorf’s is as odd as a Bengal tiger in the Texas Panhandle. Channeled by Mr. Hoffman, Truman is revealed as quite a doppelganger: fueled by pain-killers and alcohol and supported dutifully by his childhood friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener, in a role that never pays off), he is both the consummate artist at work and the most loyal of friends, yet when he accompanies her to the movie premiere of her own Pulitzer Prize–winning To Kill a Mockingbird, his dark mood of jealousy and indifference wounds her deeply.
For years, his infatuation with the young killer Perry Smith was part genuine and part superficial: stringing him along to get a confession, feeding him aspirin through the bars of a makeshift cell in the Kansas sheriff’s kitchen, bribing the warden at Leavenworth for “unlimited visitation privileges” not granted any other reporter, bringing in Richard Avedon to photograph his tattoos in prison, publicly promising the convicted killers a powerful New York appeals lawyer but privately hiding his irritation when each stay of execution further postponed the book’s Random House pub date. In every scene inside death row, the role of Perry Smith is hauntingly played by Clifton Collins Jr., a hollow-eyed actor with such vulnerability he more than matches the tortured, even sympathetic portrait of Perry by Robert Blake in In Cold Blood. Ms. Keener is fine, and there are solid contributions by Chris Cooper as Kansas investigator Alvin Dewey and Bruce Greenwood as Truman’s neglected, emotionally abused and long-suffering lover, author Jack Dunphy. (It was Truman who broke up Dunphy’s marriage to musical-comedy star Joan McCracken, but only shards of their unstable home life are glimpsed here.)
The direction by Bennett Miller is elegiac and solid, but in the end, Mr. Hoffman, who also executive-produced, is the one who gives Capote a trajectory beyond its importance. Funny, bitchy, egotistical, famous, lonely, impish, mischievous, wicked, self-destructive, generous, hateful and wallowing in self-pity, he invented the label “nonfiction novel” for In Cold Blood and made literary history. But today he is remembered more for his whine, his flamboyant midnight rants on Johnny Carson and his A-list parties than for pruning away the clutter in his pristine prose. From his effeminate, high-pitched giggle to his chubby little fingers that wrote down every word in longhand on yellow legal pads, to the demons he battled to maintain his celebrity status, Philip Seymour Hoffman gets it perfect in Capote, with a star turn both meteoric and mesmerizing. This is not an example of a fine actor bringing charisma to a movie. Lock, stock and barrel, he is the movie.
There is more—pinch me, I must be hallucinating. The credits for Good Night, and Good Luck list George Clooney as co-writer and director. He also plays the late Fred Friendly, Edward R. Murrow’s producer and later the head of CBS News. In all three capacities, he does an admirable job. This is like Fats Domino winning the Chopin competition in Vienna. Wonders never cease, and I bow with querulous enthusiasm: It’s a great, gripping movie about broadcast journalism, depicting how Edward R. Murrow defied his own network to take on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s shameful Senate subcommittee hearings on Communism in the 1950’s and expose the right-wing demagogue as the diabolical hypocrite he was. Filmed in glorious black and white, the movie (the title was Murrow’s “sign off” on See It Now and Person to Person when he was at the peak of his professional power at CBS) catalogs the precipitous insults the witch hunts forced people to endure: distinguished artists of the highest rank bullied and terrorized, network employees forced to sign loyalty oaths in staff meetings that were like pressure cookers, careers wrecked by accusations of being Communist sympathizers, actors blacklisted and broadcasters ruined. In the midst of this epidemic of ignorance and fear, Murrow held his ground, knuckling under to nobody with news coverage that delivered up to the public’s intelligence, not down to the lowest levels of embellished gossip and hearsay. It is to the everlasting credit of CBS head honcho William S. Paley (Frank Langella) that despite constant threats of government interference, ulcers and sponsor withdrawals, he gave Murrow free rein to fight injustice, expose hypocrisy and fight for quality television programming against impossible odds. He eventually lost the battle when Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle surpassed him in the ratings, but not before his courageous, informed and hard-hitting ridicule of McCarthy turned the junior Senator from Wisconsin into a diminished political laughingstock. Unfortunately, the witch hunts were not funny; they destroyed lives.
Good Night, and Good Luck brings back the kind of balanced, thoughtful and crusading television news reporting that is rare enough to be practically unheard of 50 years later. If Murrow could see how his beloved television news has disintegrated, or hear the mean-spirited blabbermouths on cable news today, he would have a stroke. Meanwhile, this is a clear, sobering, wonderfully evocative, no-nonsense film of depth and dimension, with terrific performances by Mr. Clooney, Patricia Clarkson, Robert Downey Jr., Ray Wise and Jeff Daniels as Murrow’s dedicated staff members in the CBS newsroom, and especially by David Straithairn as the chain-smoking Murrow, the gristle in his jaw tightening when the camera is on and the studio lighting illuminates the trademark cigarettes that led to the lung cancer that killed him a few years later. This is a mesmerizing film from start to finish, directed by Mr. Clooney with admirable self-assurance, and a miraculous 90 minutes.
Despite one of the dumbest titles in years, Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale is a witty, intelligent and seamless study of a Brooklyn family in a state of terminal domestic meltdown. Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels are flawless as the sparring, manipulative parents whose two sons find their equilibrium shaken and their futures on the edge of teenage burnout. More about this one when it opens commercially next week.
Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne won the big prize at Cannes this year for L’Enfant, a sad social commentary in the style of Robert Bresson about an impulsive young hustler who scrounges for a living on the streets of an ugly industrial town in Belgium. Money runs through his pockets like water, leading him into strange situations both unspeakable and compassionate, until his angelic 18-year-old girlfriend has a baby—an act with the power to force the man-boy to face fatherhood, adulthood and responsibility. Instead, he sees his newborn son as a business opportunity, reasoning that his innocent child-woman partner would be better off without motherhood anyway. He sells the baby, regrets his decision and spends the rest of the movie trying to get it back. Heartbreaking, with two raw performances by Jérémie Renier and Déborah François that span a huge range of emotion, it’s a film that leaves you limp.
All is not bliss. That overrated hack Lars von Trier is regrettably present again with Manderlay, a follow-up to the numbingly pretentious Dogville. Having garnered enough critical scorn for that incomprehensible waste of time, Nicole Kidman wisely dropped out of this fiasco, but the role of Grace is now played by a woman named Bryce Dallas Howard. Massive walkouts in Toronto. No wonder. This second entry in von Trier’s trilogy of attacks on America (a country he has never visited) proves there’s no need for a third. It’s about gangsters, lawyers and the American South, where he insists that bullwhips, cattle prods, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Civil War are still in full swing, seven decades after the abolition of slavery. The South is played by Denmark. The details are too depressing and moronic to go into, but the good news is that it is one hour shorter than Dogville.
From France, Caché ( Hidden) is a suspense yarn by the loopy Austrian director Michael Haneke about a bourgeois Parisian couple whose ordered and privileged domestic bliss is suddenly, creepily invaded by a stalker who pursues them relentlessly, with tragic results. The film begins in the chic apartment of Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), whose complacency is ruptured by the stalker. An unknown voyeur is spying on them, videotaping their arrivals and departures from the street outside, ringing their doorbell and sending them the tapes, accompanied by drawings that are bloody, violent and threatening. At first Georges, a popular television personality, thinks it might be an angry viewer. The police are no help, and as the drawings get bloodier and more personal, he decides it might be the work of someone who knows him. The chief suspect is an Arab boy he betrayed during the French colonial occupation of Algeria. Wracked by a growing anxiety and feeling his nerves beginning to crack, Georges tracks down the man without telling his wife, causing a rift, and soon one is unable to tell who is victimizing whom. We think everything is solved, but then, with true Hitchcockian flourish, the predator commits suicide and the mystery continues, leaving the audience with goose bumps.
Director Haneke specializes in gloomy films about average people plunged into terrifying circumstances beyond their control—pathetic, outrageous and finally frightening—who discover their own hidden capacities for hostility and violence. Words cannot describe how much I have despised his previous films in general, and the nauseating, demented La Pianiste in particular (who could forget the bizarre Isabelle Huppert, raping her own mother, then slicing open her sex organs in a white porcelain bathtub?) Caché is his most accessible film to date, and Mr. Auteuil and Ms. Binoche are alternately graceful and scary as people pushed to the brink of madness through sheer duress, and the director does a tense job of capturing their panic as they drift from tranquility into chaos. It’s time for a nail-biting psychological thriller, and with Caché, the New York Film Festival has found one to keep your eyes glued to the screen.
Not a bad start, I’d say, for an event that used to keep my eyes glued to my watch and the doors marked “Exit.”
