“Capote” Directed by: Bennett Miller

Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr., Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood

MPRA rating: R (adult language, brief violence)

Running time: 114 min.

Best suited for: True crime and historical drama buffs

Least suited for: The goreor suspense-seeking crime junkie Acorn’s Rating Guide:

Despite a gifted, five-star performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role, “Capote” the movie spends too much effort in depicting the man’s eccentricities and too little time focusing on the inner turmoil that defined Truman Capote. This is a film that begs to be deconstructed by the audience—although in doing so, one gradually becomes aware of a lack of substance behind the sentimental facade.

Truman Capote all but invented the modern “nonfiction novel” with his 1965 publication “In Cold Blood.” Arguably one of the best true crime novels of the last century, part of its allure came from the author’s deeprooted fascination with killer Perry Smith. Capote, an openly gay and flamboyant writer for The New Yorker, gambled his entire career covering the Clutter family murders in Holcomb, Kan.

It was a story, he told friends, that he was “born to write.”

Perhaps so. Yet “In Cold Blood” was the last book Capote would complete. In many respects, its writing depleted him of both emotional and literary strength. He would ultimately become a reclusive caricature of himself before dying in 1984 of alcohol abuse.

Did writing “In Cold Blood” destroy not only Capote’s integrity but also his urge to write? “Capote” the film insinuates that it did, but rarely does the film dig beneath his conflicted surface to provide a detailed study. Most of Capote’s flamboyance remains tucked into a few fashionable New York cocktail party scenes, where, as life of the party, Capote relishes playing the role of Capote.

The film depicts Perry Smith as a quiet, misunderstood transient who, with partner Richard Hickock, murdered a family of four. But rarely does the film allow Smith to drop the gentle demeanor to reveal the killer inside. In the 1967 bioflick based on Capote’s book, Robert Blake delivered an empathetic yet chilling portrayal of Smith in a film that, in my opinion, gave audiences a far more intimate appraisal—a facet that “Capote” fails to explore. Late in this film, Smith’s sister warns Capote to beware her brother’s surface gentility, yet we’re never privy to the inner demons that allowed Perry Smith to viciously execute the Clutter family.

The audience is offered few insights into Smith’s strange, symbiotic relationship with Capote, although their friendship apparently endured for several years until Smith’s execution in 1964. Cinematography has the extraordinary power to dissolve the confines of two men in a prison cell—witness the extraordinary “Kiss of the Spider Woman”—but “Capote’s” numerous Leavenworth scenes remain superficial and oddly monotonic.

The film seems filled with missed beats, both in simple conversations between Capote and Smith and in Capote’s jumping between the desolate Kansas flatlands and sunny Spain with his lover and compatriots. I felt as if director Bennett Miller was forcing us to come to our own conclusions, the audience asked to vicariously experience Capote’s feelings of uncertainty. “Capote” refuses to deeply explore the relationship between the author and Smith, perhaps to avoid straying outside the known story, the bounds of reality—although, sometimes, isn’t that what film does best?

In a nutshell: Despite a probable Oscar nod to Hoffman for his superb portrayal, the story surrounding that performance is lacking. “Capote” captures the extravagant and quirky nuances, but hardly the essence of the man who became America’s literary darling for a decade. The Kansas murders that both made and broke Truman Capote remain oddly distanced and sanitized in a film that seems more content to focus on the mannerisms of the man than his soul.