[ThisWeek] UI Chamber Music Series and Capote at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

Enter to win a Kenworthy Film Society Pass
Take our survey before March 1 and enter the drawing to win a Kenworthy Film
Society pass good for 10 Sunday movie admissions.  Pick up a survey in the
lobby or go to http://www.kenworthy.org

UI Chamber Music Series presents
Masters of Persian Music
Thursday, March 2
4:00 PM
Free

Capote (R)
Friday. March 3
7:00 PM
Saturday & Sunday, March 4 & 5
4:15 PM & 7:00 PM
$5/adult
KFS passes accepted for Sunday showings
(see Review below)
* * *

March at the Kenworthy

Closed for Spring Break
March 10 - 17

Manderlay (UN)
March 18 - 19
3:50 & 7:00 PM

UI Women¹s Center presents
Lunafest
March 23
7:00 PM
$5/adult, $3/student or senior

Prairie Flyer &
Grangeville Bluegrass Co.
Friday, March 24
7:00 PM
$12/adult, $8/child under 13
Tickets will go on sale March 1.

Transamerica (R)
March 25 - 26
4:25 & 7:00 PM

UI presents
American Indian Film Festival
March 29 - April 1

Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $2/child 12 or younger
KFS series pass prices:  $30/10 films, $75/30 films.
KFS passes accepted year-round for Sunday movies!

For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a
schedule, visit www.kenworthy.org.

Coming in April: Sirius Idaho Theatre presents A Walk in the Woods &
Collected Stories; The Celestine Prophecy; The Best of Youth; Cache; Why we
Fight.
* * *

This week¹s movie review-

Capote

Academy Award Nominations for ³Capote²

Best Motion Picture of the Year
Best Achievement in Directing: Bennett Miller
Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role: Catherine Keener
Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published:
Dan Futterman 

Directed by Bennett Miller and written by Dan Futterman,
Running time: 98 minutes
Rated R for some violent images and brief strong language.

As reviewed by Paul Clinton writing for the CNN

Let me put this bluntly: "Capote" is, without a doubt, one of the best films
of the year.

And Philip Seymour Hoffman -- who delivers a brilliant performance -- is a
sure bet for a best actor nomination come Oscar time. (You can start your
Oscar pools now.)

Hoffman doesn't impersonate the eccentric author; instead he appears to
embody him. He never overly imitates the well-known, and often mocked,
speech patterns or mannerisms of the man, but rather nails his essences
without turning to parody. (It's saying something that Hoffman, who stands
5-foot-10, effortlessly captures the diminutive Capote without ever calling
attention to his height.)

The film begins in the late '50s when Capote, fresh off the success of
"Breakfast at Tiffany's," reads a short newspaper article in The New York
Times about the slaying of a rural Kansas family, the Clutters. Capote
decides the topic is perfect for The New Yorker magazine, an article in
which he will show the effect of such a brutal murder on the inhabitants of
a small town.

In the company of his childhood companion, Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine
Keener) -- soon to write her one and only novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird" --
Capote sets off for the small farm community of Holcomb, Kansas, where the
Clutters were killed. Lee's soft side helps Capote ingratiate himself in the
close-knit, and somewhat intolerant, community, and Capote starts
interviewing people.

Chris Cooper plays Capote's police guide, Kansas investigator Alvin Dewey,
and he's brilliant as usual. Clifton Collins Jr. and Mark Pelligrino, as
killers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, play a cat-and-mouse game with
Capote, always realizing deep down that it's the story, not their lives,
that compels the author.

Indeed, Smith and Capote's relationship entered some gray areas beyond that
of subject and reporter, and Collins uses that knowledge to the hilt.

As for Capote, the article became a book, and after awhile he knew that "In
Cold Blood," the book that resulted from his reporting, could only have one
ending that would be satisfactory as literature -- that of the killers'
deaths. He would twist himself into knots waiting for it, divided between
the humanity of caring about his real-life characters and the more brutal
desire to satiate his own ego.

"Capote" was directed by Bennett Miller and written by
actor-turned-screenwriter Dan Futterman, childhood friends who have been
pursuing this project for years. Both do an exceptional job with their first
major film. Keener is amazing; after years of playing brassy characters in
such films as "Being John Malkovich," she shows an entirely new side with
Lee.

But, without diminishing the contributions of all "Capote's" participants,
this is Hoffman's film. He's a delight. Truman Capote was a complicated and
competitive man with many demons; Hoffman conveys all sides of him to
perfection, letting you see the man behind the glasses, the voice, the
pouting humor.

Capote, with typical hyperbole, once said that writing "In Cold Blood" was
the reason he was born. I'll indulge in hyperbole as well: Hoffman was born
to play this role. Here's looking forward to acknowledgment of his triumph
at Oscar time.

As reviewed by David Denby writing for the New Yorker

On November 15, 1959, while luxuriating in abundant literary and social
success in New York, the young Truman Capote was called to an unexpectedly
spartan test. On that day, in Holcomb, Kansas, two ex-cons looking for money
and thrills murdered four members of the Clutter family on their farm. A few
weeks later, Capote, who had been eager to expand the boundaries of
journalism, went to investigate the case for The New Yorker. Whatever his
ambitions, Capote was an odd man for a police-blotter job. He was born in
1924 in New Orleans, and grew up in Alabama, Connecticut, and New York,
where he went to the Trinity School for a while and worked briefly as an
office boy at this magazine. For years, many readers (and, in particular,
writers) have wondered how this habitué of Le Pavillon and La Côte Basque,
with his high, thin, goose-quill voice and his floating palms, could
possibly have gained the trust of the straightforward men and women of rural
Kansas. In ³Capote,² which stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, the writer, Dan
Futterman, and the director, Bennett Miller, satisfy that curiosity.
³Capote,² which draws extensively on Gerald Clarke¹s 1988 biography, is
devoted almost entirely to the five years in which Capote lived and wrote
³In Cold Blood,² an assignment that became a four-part series, a
best-selling book, and a literary classic. Small-scaled and limited,
³Capote² is nevertheless the most intelligent, detailed, and absorbing film
ever made about a writer¹s working method and character‹in this case, a
mixed quiver of strength, guile, malice, and mendacity.

Moviegoers who have followed Philip Seymour Hoffman¹s supporting work in
such films as ³The Talented Mr. Ripley² and ³Cold Mountain² sensed that he
had a lot more to give, and here it is. As the cinematographer, Adam Kimmel,
moves in close, Hoffman¹s Capote looms up like some strange Rushmoric
outcropping‹heavy-domed skull, golden hair, pink skin, double-peaked upper
lip, owlish glasses, and blue eyes that occasionally peer directly at the
bruised ego and longings of the person in front of him. Hoffman starts with
the physical and works inward to the soul. He¹s only a few years older than
Capote was when he went to Kansas, but his thicker features seem to forecast
the coarsening of face and body and the spreading spiritual rot that
afflicted the writer in the years after the book came out. As Hoffman plays
him, Capote is an actor, too: a wounded personality who remade himself; a
public figure capable of facing down scorn. Holding forth at parties with
cigarette and glass in hand, he dispenses rancorous gossip in a way that
cuts off any possible life beyond his perfect sentences.

Although Capote, working hard, eventually befriended several people in
Holcomb, his first foray there would have been a disaster were it not for
his childhood pal Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), who was soon to
publish ³To Kill a Mockingbird,² and who came along as his assistant. As
Capote waltzes around the dour courthouses and landscapes in a sheepskin
coat and an enormous Bergdorf¹s scarf, Lee makes the initial contacts and
performs the introductions. Never taking a note, he boasts of near-total
recall; he boasts, too, of the book he¹s going to write before he has
written a word of it. He sobers up only when he sets eyes on one of the
captured murderers, Perry Smith. (The movie almost dispenses with the other
killer, Dick Hickock.) As Perry, Clifton Collins, Jr., is not as sensual and
insinuating as Robert Blake, who crooned his way through the role in the
frightening 1967 movie version of ³In Cold Blood,² but he¹s darkly handsome,
with an abashed, yearning manner. Alone with Perry in his cell, Capote is
stunned: this beautiful sociopath is material‹a gold mine, in fact‹and also
a sympathetic human being whose miserable childhood and need for recognition
match Capote¹s own history and ravenous hungers. ³It¹s O.K. It¹s Truman.
It¹s your friend,² Hoffman says in his strangely incisive baby voice. In
those early moments of interest and empathy, the masterpiece is born.

Perry warms to Capote¹s attentions, and the rest of the movie turns into a
complicated struggle between the two of them, with a desperate Perry telling
Capote enough of his story to try to motivate the writer to help him, and a
devious Capote both kid-gloving and bullying Perry until he opens up and
describes the night of the murders. Determined to create a new form‹the
³nonfiction novel²‹Capote gets in deep with Perry. As the court appeals go
on, staying the executions, their relations become an artistically necessary
but morally questionable mixture of affection, fascination, and
exploitation. But by 1965, Capote, exhausted from his bouts of research and
writing, turns ruthless and antic; Hoffman swings back to party mode as
Capote privately and publicly longs for the men to hang so that he can
finish his manuscript.

Strictly speaking, this intense little movie is not an independent film: it
was a dying major, United Artists, that entrusted a reported seven million
dollars to the former high-school friends Dan Futterman, an actor, and
Bennett Miller, who had directed only the documentary ³The Cruise.² But
³Capote² is unimaginable without the independent-film movement of the past
twenty years or so. Apart from some sweeping shots of an extremely
horizontal Kansas (the movie was actually shot in Manitoba), the filmmakers
work intimately, with an easy, unstressed understanding of such things as
Capote¹s homosexuality and the fervent solicitude that his friends felt for
him‹solicitude mixed with jealousy, exasperation, and dismay. No doubt
people will pick at inaccuracies in the portrait and say, ³That¹s not
Truman,² but ³Capote² is Truman enough‹and an image likely to make any
writer grimace in recognition. There are some oddities: Harper Lee¹s
character is a little fuzzy, and the filmmakers turn William Shawn (Bob
Balaban), the editor of The New Yorker, into an aggressive force who pushes
the plot along. For the record, Shawn was not in the habit of demanding the
bloody details in stories about murder, or of rushing off to the Midwest to
keep his writers company at executions. Finally, the filmmakers¹ suggestion
that Capote never recovered from the death of Perry Smith, or from the
success of ³In Cold Blood,² strikes me as doubly sentimental. Capote was
ultimately done in by alcohol. Yet, however one interprets it, the finale is
acrid: the chronicler of death triumphs, and then has nowhere to go but to
his own inglorious end.

* * *
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
208-882-4127
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org
To speak with a KPAC staff member,
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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