Capote

Herald rating: * * * * *

A mesmerising performance by Hoffman in the title role anchors this film, which leaps instantly and effortlessly into a best-of list of films about the artistic process.

Hoffman, one of America's hardest-working and most versatile actors, has tended to fill supporting rather than starring roles throughout his productive career. As a result, he's had less recognition than he deserves - though that should change when, as must happen, he adds the Best Actor Oscar to his Golden Globe next month.

Here, he doesn't so much mimic or even incarnate Truman Capote, the fabled, flamboyant and ultimately doomed writer of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, rather he brings him to back to life and lays him bare. It is a masterful display of craft and artistry and as fine a piece of screen acting as might be imagined.

The film confines itself to the climactic few years in the writer's life, when he researched and wrote In Cold Blood. The 1965 book charted the investigation into the murder of a farming family in the Kansas wheat country, the hunt for their killers, and their trials, appeals and ultimate execution.

Capote, an extravagantly gay New Yorker, persuaded the editor of the New Yorker to commission an extended feature from him and swept into the small town in the heartland in his camel-hair coat, accompanied by his friend Harper Lee (Keener).

Despite his conspicuously camp mannerisms - not least a high, fey voice - he gained the confidence of the locals, including the cop in charge of the investigation (Cooper) and of the killers, Dick Hickock (Pellegrino) and Perry Smith (Collins), once they were arrested.

Soon, he realises that the story is bigger than an article and proposes "the book I was born to write". He says it will create a whole new genre, the non-fiction novel. "When I think how good it could be, I can hardly breathe," he says.

Well, it was good and it made Capote the kind of star modern writers find hard to imagine. It took him six years to research and write but he made US$2 million from paperback and movie rights. Inflation-adjusted, that's NZ$17.7 million, or more than $100 a word.

But Capote is not a film about the star. It is about the price paid for stardom. The script, based on a section of Gerald Clarke's wonderful 1988 biography, dissects the complicated relationship between the writer and his subjects, in particular with Smith, the killer with whom Capote developed a relationship eerily close to love.

Before our eyes, professional devotion becomes obsession and Capote's initially compassionate impulses become a kind of voyeuristic urge, as he comes close to manipulating events for his own purposes. It is, in the end, a film about a man who makes a Faustian pact with himself and watches while he corrodes from the inside out.

CAST: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr, Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood, Bob Balaban, Amy Ryan, Mark Pellegrino
DIRECTOR: Bennett Miller
RUNNING TIME: 115 mins
RATING: M, violence and offensive language
SCREENING: Rialto from Thursday