The films are two sides of the same interpretive coin; viewed together, they get us closer to the full story of what led to Capote’s downfall as he worked on his “nonfiction novel” than either film could have managed on its own. – based on portions of Gerald Clarke’s official biography of the writer – played out like a Greek tragedy in which the hero, for all his literary and repertorial gifts, was eventually undone by vanity and opportunism while creating his career-defining work. There wasn’t much doubt as to what director Bennett Miller, screenwriter Dan Futterman and Oscar-winning lead Philip Seymour Hoffman thought of their subject.
One could admire Capote's ability to empathize with his subjects and thereby put them at ease, but according to the film, he ultimately manipulated his subjects to satisfy his own outsize ego, and it led to his moral ruin and creative decline. takes a more complex approach to exploring Capote’s disintegration. For starters, it's a hell of a lot less grim than Miller’s film.
starts out on a somber note – Laura Kinney going to her friend Nancy Clutter’s house and finding the Clutter family's corpses the morning after they were murdered – and played variations on that note for about two hours. Even in the film’s early scenes – when Capote doesn’t quite know what he’s gotten himself into by deciding to write about the Clutter murders – the pall of tragedy hangs over everything. McGrath, however, gradually shifts his film's tone as the story unfolds, so that the film itself mirrors Capote’s downward spiral.
The first half of plays, for the most part, like a lighthearted culture-clash romp in which an elite New York celebrity (impressively played here by Toby Jones, who is made to look more like the real Capote than Hoffman did) descends upon the working-class milieu of Holcomb, Kansas with his sumptuous fur coats, effeminate mannerisms, and true Hollywood stories, all the while remaining largely oblivious to how the other half lives. McGrath's essentially comic setup yields several running gags, including the townspeople frequently thinking he’s a woman, and Capote's insistence on referring to serious, reserved Holcomb police chief Alvin Dewey (Jeff Daniels) as “Foxy.” There is the suggestion – barely touched upon in – that it was his stories about Hollywood celebrities – especially the one in which he beat Humphrey Bogart in arm-wrestling on the set of Beat the Devil – rather than any special journalistic prowess that allowed certain key Holcomb residents to open up to him more readily.
Also intriguing is the film's characterization of Capote's research assistant, childhood friend and fellow writer Nelle Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock, a standout); where depicted Lee mainly as a mostly loyal childhood friend, McGrath makes her tough-minded straight man (or woman) to the bumbling, fumbling Capote. All of this is more or less based on fact, and all of it works pretty darn well as a comedy. But an intrusion of seriousness occurs in the first half when Capote visits the Clutter household, and while the remainder of explores some of the same issues as , in a similarly (though arguably less oppressively) somber style, the films’ implications are sometimes startlingly different.
One of the film's more provocative implications has to do with Capote's bond with Perry Smith (played by a commandingly intense Daniel Craig). It’s true that Capote developed an odd kind of love relationship toward Perry, finding a kindred soul of sorts – both men had troubled childhoods, both men had an affection towards literature, etc. The films are two sides of the same interpretive coin; viewed together, they get us closer to the full story of what led to Capote’s downfall as he worked on his “nonfiction novel” than either film could have managed on its own.
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