
Daniel Mendelsohn writes thoughtfully in the latest New York Review of Books about Bennett Miller’s Capote, a film that paints the writer as confidence man, and writing based on someone else’s life as an enterprise fraught with dangerous opportunities for exploitation.
The ideas aren’t new; a friend who saw the film with me on Sunday recalled Graham Greene’s observation that every novelist has a sliver of ice in his heart. But Philip Seymour Hoffman inhabits the grasping Capote so fully and evokes his manipulations so chillingly that, as Mendelsohn says, “the creation of In Cold Blood [becomes] a moral tragedy along Faustian lines — a drama in which the fulfillment of the protagonist’s dreams comes at a monstrous price.”
Also of note: