Reviews

Obviously this film is not intended to be a realistic rendering of Wilde's text, too often talked about by those who have never seriously read it. Nor does this film even intend to bear comparison with one classic and several abysmal "more faithful" interpretations. If Jarman were being credited with this film, reviewers would labor far more carefully to make some artistic and spiritual justification for the choices. It seems fashionable to bash this film, while tolerating and even praising far shallower interpretations. I have seen them all.

So, what is this variation attempting to accomplish. It takes a true innocent of breathtaking beauty, and shows that such innocence is constitutionally unable to defend or heal itself. It is a Beauty every human so envies and hates, that uncontrollable malice arises in each person to destroy and ruin the Beauty of Innocence. Every character in the piece carves, distorts, spoils and overpaints the original innocence of Man with doubts, fears, questions, and most of all judgments, until Dorian Gray becomes a collection of wounds, scars, defacements and ugliness which have literally driven out the innocence, life and Beauty, leaving only a corrupted husk. The theme is Man's "fall from innocence," universal ingratitude, and unmitigable envy. The core of this variation on Dorian Gray can be found in one line uttered by literature's most evil character, Iago: "He hath a daily beauty in his life/That makes me ugly."

I think Josh Duhamel's Dorian is simply beautiful in its simplicity and transparency. This young actor is more generous and less vain in his own physical beauty than any other interpreter of the role. He "gives" that beauty to you, the viewer, without any withholding or judgment of your worthiness to receive his radiance. He IS innocence and beauty, therefore he IS simplicity, wonder, and total vulnerability. Not since Terrence Stamp debuted as Billy Budd has innocent beauty been so unfailingly personated.

Like others, I have seen and studied most of the books and films concerning the Clutter Killings, including a few dramatic works thematically based on the actions and psycho-mythology of the participants to the crime -- including Capote himself. As to Capote, I cannot forgive him for willfully withholding Perry Smith's confessions, intimacies and writings from even the defense counsels. I believe truths and facts Capote "reserved" for his "book," which required for Capote two guilty verdicts and capital punishment, would almost certainly have sustained a successful insanity defense for Perry Smith even under the old McNaughton Rule. Capote himself could never write another major literary work after "In Cold Blood." Shame and guilt. In my opinion, he willingly encouraged and planned the brutal capital punishment to provide the spectacular ending he required for his book/drama. To him, both men HAD to die for his book to succeed. The book had to justify itself by pretending it was about the horror of capital punishment. His actions and silence assured that ice-cold conclusion.

Capote's book is not truth. It is not factual or journalistic. It is drama and melodrama spiced with his own creatively psychotic imagination. What most people consider the virtues of the contemporaneous first movie are stark images of Capote's mind, which may have been the most cold-blooded aspect of all. No wonder viewers ironically but necessarily prefer Blake's performance. That actor IS the nightmare from Capote's dishonest imaginings.

So who is to say how the two killers should be played? Who is to judge what could make an essentially poetic psychotic snap from excessive courtesy and kindness to "do it now" killing? I agree with the few who see in Eric Roberts' work a magnificent performance, Shakespearean in its range, yet played with heartbreaking sincerity. Anthony Edwards takes a much safer "attitude mode" to create a smarmy Hickok; but he is one-dimensional and boring, with only a few notes in his television range. Roberts is almost four-dimensional, adding physical weakness and agony to a powerful animal body, a Frankenstein Creature who thinks in poetry and knows exactly what NOT to do. Like Leopold apropos Loeb, Robert's Perry Smith is hopelessly in love with an evil man. Without Hickok or a man of his particularities, Perry Smith would not have brought his psychotic mind into a world of horrors. He fears himself more than he fears anything else in life.

Given the freedom from Capote's death grip on the consciousness of the Clutter killings, Roberts and Edwards are free to create original personalities and psychoses to craft a different and new production of the drama. Same facts, some of the same lines from the case record, but deeper, more complex, with clearly titanic psychotic stresses -- indeed Roberts is so good at this fluidic madness that he physically and facially demonstrates in every moment how little awareness he has of where or who he is.

What many of our reviewers dislike about this film, Roberts in particular, is that cold-blooded killing isn't shown the way they expect and have been manipulated to demand. That is because here we are seeing a far more profoundly realistic "interpretation of life and death" than Capote could ever create -- a real Tragedy.

The actual cold-blooded killer, Mr. Capote, and his hypocritically artistic "non-fiction novel" do not control these interpretations and performances.

If "In Cold Blood" and Capote's effect on life, literature and truth matters as much as scholars say, then it takes guts as well as talent to portray the truth, or a version of the truth, that is not the rank, cowardly lie drawn up from the fathoms of Capote's own abyss.