"Capote"

My review from the October 10th American Conservative (available to electronic subscribers on Saturday).

Philip Seymour Hoffman, the pallid, pudgy, and titanic character actor best known for playing rock critic Lester Bangs in "Almost Famous," confirms his stature as the American Alec Guinness in "Capote," a biopic recounting the six years Truman Capote devoted to his pathbreaking 1966 "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood, the progenitor of the True Crime genre.

I'd always pictured Hoffman as a bear of a man -- he's long been the fan favorite to play the mountainous Ignatius J. Reilly in the great New Orleans comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces, which has languished in Hollywood's Development Hell for a quarter of a century -- but in "Capote" he almost disappears into a very different son of the Crescent City, the tiny, epicene café society raconteur with the voice of an effeminate child. ("Capote" opens September 30 in NYC and LA.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer