In 1966, Truman Capote became the most famous writer in the United States, perhaps, for a delirious moment, simply the most famous man in the United States. This was due to his sensational "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood, with which he virtually invented the modern genre of reportage. The true-life nature of his subject - the brutal slaying of a farmer's family in Kansas - had a horrible, unacknowledged sexiness that polite literary fiction could not match; reality gave it ballast and sinew, and Capote awarded himself the novelist's licence to intuit feelings, ideas, moods. Readers then as now struggled to see how the metropolitan gadfly who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's could have moved on to this. It was as if Audrey Hepburn has stopped singing Moon River and taken a chainsaw to George Peppard. How the heck had this aesthete-weakling armwrestled American reality into submission? The clue is in the title. In Cold Blood was supposed to mean the icily detached attitude of the young killers. But Bennett Miller's highly watchable biopic turns it around. He makes it Capote's own stunningly effective modus operandi. Capote - brilliantly impersonated here by Philip Seymour Hoffman - is a literary vampire, disarming local cops and townsfolk with his fey childlike manner while all the time drinking in everything that would make a good story. He fed ruthlessly off convicted killer Perry Smith as he languished in prison, interviewing him, befriending him, effectively seducing him - buying him a stay of execution with expensive lawyers and then, once he'd got his story, turning off the legal life support machine so that Smith's hanging would provide a neat ending. Graham Greene said you needed a sliver of ice in your heart to be a writer. Capote has half the Antarctic in there. Hoffman appears magically to lose 60% of his (substantial) body mass to play the tiny, elfin Capote; the author is shown wearing an absurd topcoat and callow Woosteresque scarf for his travels in Kansas, or a sharply turned suit and razor-sharp sideparting for his appearances at smart New York parties, in which his quavering drawl is caught in mid-outrageous-anecdote: "Jimmy Baa-aa-ldwin told me he didn't want his new book to be a praa-aa-hblem novel. I said, Jimmy, it's about a nig-rah homosexual who's screwing a Jew; that's a praa-aa-hblem, isn't it?" His Capote is also a compulsive liar: perhaps necessary for the craft of non-fiction novel-writing. Capote is shown gleefully telling a friend about the brilliant title he has hit on for the book. In the very next scene, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr), suspicious of how his new best friend is going to portray him, asks Capote what the title is going to be - and Capote smoothly tells him he hasn't decided. It is actually one of the very rare occasions in a movie when a character is shown lying without any explicit, retributive moment of disclosure, however small, to reassure us that the liar knows what he is doing and that lying is wrong. With unthinkable lack of decency, and brilliant journalistic flair, Capote blags his way into the funeral parlour where the shooting victims are in their coffins, and actually heaves up the lids to look at the shattered faces which are swathed in a dull white material. When Capote reads his description of this moment aloud to a rapt audience of Manhattan literary types, he claims that these swathes of material made the heads look grotesquely larger than they were and they were covered in some sort of lint which sparkled in the light like Christmas novelty snow. We know something the audience doesn't, something that maybe Capote himself doesn't realise. He is making these compelling details up. Hoffman's Capote is the most magnificently unsympathetic figure: whingeing, self-obsessed, unwilling to accommodate himself to his lover's needs; ungrateful for the help given to him by his friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) and sullenly envious at her success with To Kill a Mockingbird. And yet he has passionate, authentic vocation to his art: spending years on this one project, where a mere journalist might have lost interest or stamina long before. The problem is that his Capote is also a very opaque character, and his naturally queeny self-dramatisation and self-deprecation doesn't quite convey exactly what he must have felt in the face of this horror, particularly his witnessing Smith's execution. It's a shame that we see so little of Chris Cooper, playing the taciturn investigating cop: a more interesting sparring partner for Capote than the callow Smith. "I'll never get it over it," he whines on the phone to Lee, while wearing his littleboy's pyjamas. Perhaps it was himself he never got over. Yet Miller adroitly suggests that he was right, that In Cold Blood exalted and yet finished him as a writer, unable to complete another substantial novel and blocked until his death from heart failure in 1984. (Harper Lee, on the other h

some randomness just because: ~i have a love/hate affair with sundays lately. well, it probably has to do with my dislike/hate affair with my job i have to go back to tomorrow ;) ~i have been having this mini photo sessions with the light in my house any chance i get. it is fun. my hard drive has so much sun flare stored in it you wouldn't believe it. ~i have gained all my weight back and more. i am sort of disgusted with myself, but am trying not to beat myself up too much. i did have a dance party in my pajamas today, so that was good. ~ i got ridiculously drunk on friday night, probably because of fact number one. i still sort of have the headache. ~i am usually an avid reader, but lately i am havig big issues staying focused on books. not sure why as this has never happened to me before. ~ i don't think i want to be a nurse anymore. that scares me. it also excites me. i have no idea what i want to be instead. ~i watched john mayer on "storytellers" yesterday and he made me cry. which is weird, because i didn't even really know i liked him. i LOVE it when people surprise me. ~ i have periods of time where i isolate and hibernate for large stretches of time. now is one of those times. i hope i come out of it soon. ~i have the best family and friends a girl could ever ask for. i have been waking up every morning and literally having to remind myself of just how lucky i am because some of my patients lately have had such hard luck problems with their illnesses. these people are constant reminders of how short life really is to me everyday. i feel like these reminders make me lucky, too. ~ i think i am gonna go have another dance party ;) week 4 of 52 weeks of self portraits this is my picture for january 31, 2010