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Bennett Miller
CapoteThe last time Bennett Miller, 39, got behind the camera, he followed frizzy-haired Timothy ''Speed'' Levitch for The Cruise, his award-winning 1998 documentary about a wacky New York City tour guide who made his low-paying (but fascinating) day job look like the coolest gig in the world. So for his next film, Miller chose to tackle junior high classmate Dan Futterman's script for Capote. In doing so, he's created another cutting, seductive study of a true American original, author and boldface name Truman Capote, whose 1966 classic In Cold Blood redefined the boundaries of modern journalism. Under Miller's steady direction — which has earned him his first Oscar nod — Capote's investigation of a shocking quadruple murder in Kansas plays like a life-altering revelation. Which is exactly what it was: The writer's journey to the country's gray and — here, at least — foreboding center would turn into a zealous quest for truth, fame, success, and, ultimately, deliverance.
The project was complicated by news of Infamous, a competing Capote biopic starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Daniels, and Sandra Bullock. Still, at no point during Capote's 115 minutes does one sense an iota of doubt on Miller's part. In fact, he pulls off a controlled look at how Capote (played by Miller's boyhood chum Philip Seymour Hoffman) manipulated his subject, murderer Perry Smith, with little regard for the human behind the horrors. (Lesser filmmakers might have offered the wily hero a free pass or two.) ''It's a very suspicious, untrusting, dyspeptic guy going insane,'' Miller says of Capote. ''And after some of [Philip]'s best takes, his greatest moments, my feeling wasn't simply 'Boy, that was great.' It was also 'Oh, poor guy!''' It's that empathy that gives Miller's biopic its strange and gothic heart.
