Truman Capote's life was full of drama, and the most dramatic period of his life was when he was researching and writing his masterpiece, 'In Cold Blood' between late 1959 and the spring of 1965. The book tells the story of the gruesome murder of an entire Kansan farming family, the Clutters, by two thugs named Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. The motive for the killings was to silence the witnesses to the robbery of their farmhouse, but the killings were totally senseless. The killers escaped with $30-40 and a portable radio. For this four people were killed, including a sixteen year-old girl and a fifteen year-old boy. Smith and Hickock did kill in cold blood, but as Capote shows us in his incredible book, they were human like the rest of us. This film covers the period when Capote was researching and writing this book, and shows his relationships to the killers, also raising the moral question of whether he used them for his book, his art being more important than human life.

The film is well shot, using greys, blues and pastels to wonderfully evoke the period and give the dark subject matter some gravity. Every scene tells us something about Capote, like any good biopic- but this film wants to be more than that. It attempts to show us an extraordinary person (Capote) in even more extraordinary circumstances. As the subtitle of Capote's book suggested, it is the documentation of the aftermath of the slaying of the Clutters, and the effect of this on a small, close-knit prairie town where it occurred.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, won the Best Oscar at the 2006 awards for his portrayal of Capote. This was deserved. His performance is detailed and minutely nuanced, capturing Capote's eccentricities without caricaturing him, and anyone who has seen documentary footage of the real Capote would probably agree. It's almost eerie how he gets the whining, camp voice. Hoffman always brings a hint of menace to any character he plays (think of his spoilt playboy Freddie in 'The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1999). Like many highly accomplished actors, there is something ambiguous and unpredictable about Hoffman. Just like Truman Capote himself.

Catherine Keener gives a very solid performance as Nelle Harper Lee, the author of 'To Kill a Mocking Bird' which was unpublished when she went to the Kansan town of Holcomb to research the murders and their locale. We see a great chemistry between Hoffman and Keener, and this serves the film well, because Capote and Lee had been friends since their Louisiana childhoods. This relationship gives some humanity to the portrayal of Capote. The writer could easily have been portrayed as cold himself, but the interaction with Lee melts him slightly, and Hoffman's performance comes to life best when he shares the screen with Keener. The film also shows how Lee's easy manner helped the urbane and camp Capote to temporarily integrate with the earthy, male-dominated Kansan farming community.

The relationship -perhaps homoerotic- that Capote developed with one of the killers, Perry Smith, is also depicted, but not in enough depth. It is alluded to, but so much more could have been done with this- there was no sense of a full circle of character motivation on both sides. Likewise, many of the scenes, which unfold the story, seem very mechanised and almost sanitised- like a dot-to-dot story, and then Capote did this. Here's Capote being blackly cynical at a New York literary party; here's Capote at his typewriter, etc. So much more depth could've been achieved. There was no real feeling of Capote's personal alienation, already creeping into his life. No reference to his writing obsession with any depth: showing him huddled over a Remington isn't enough. This is no slight on Hoffman's performance, but on the script and structure of the film itself. Anybody who's read the biography by Gerald Clarke on which the script is based will know that there was far more drama in Capote's life in this period: Capote's increasing substance dependence, his low sense of self-worth (despite an extroverted exterior), the troubles in his love life with the writer Jack Dunphy, his dangerously driven ambition, and his insecurity about his own position in literature. This film was interesting to watch, but like most biopics, it is too simplistic.

At the end it is stated at the start of the credits that Capote never finished another book after 'In Cold Blood'. This is technically true, if you are talking about a project of that size and magnitude, but he did complete some other works after 1966. The film seems to insinuate that the experience of seeing the killers (particularly Smith) hanged in early 1965 traumatised Capote, and the subsequent guilt about his 'use' of them for his career led to his drying up as a writer. This is only partially true. Capote spent years working on his novel 'Answered Prayers' (later published unfinished) and is about the vacuous and cynical lives of America's super-rich aristocracy, who were also Capote's friends. But when these friends (the same powerful ones who attended his famous Black and White Ball in 1966 shown in the film) realised that Capote was using their real lives as material for his writing (only very thinly-veiled in some cases), they abandoned him. Capote was socially ostracised, and remembering that he was a complex character who needed to be loved (see his childhood in the biography) this was disastrous for him. He turned more and more to drugs and alcohol and unhappy love affairs for solace, dying at the age of 59 in 1984, so bloated he looked almost inhuman at the end.

This is an enjoyable film, but not entirely thought through. It is somewhat misleading- it wasn't just the events of 1959-66 shown in the film that led to this decline, there were much more complex reasons for this. He may have felt guilt about the killer Smith, but he did it all again, and to his best friends. A social butterfly (as Capote was) needs to flutter, and once his wings were clipped he could only decline.

The truth is that Capote loved writing more than people. He would have sacrificed anything for his writing- personal relationships, his reputation, finally himself. Words killed him in the end. And to go back to the point about Capote never finishing another piece of work after 1966, check out his very fine novella, 'Hand Carved Coffins' from 1975. This reaffirms yet again why he is considered one of the finest prose writers of the Twentieth Century, and the cost of this on Capote and others around him is not shown with enough depth in this film.