Capote

I finally got around to seeing Capote on Friday night. Yes, Philip Seymour Hoffman gave the performance of a lifetime; he was so sleek and so flamboyant--so different from the various contemporary slackers he's played in other films. And yes, the film was powerful enough to give me the shivers the whole next day . . . but my favorite part of the movie by far was the attention devoted to Harper Lee.

The portrayal only sharpened my already keen admiration for her. I think To Kill a Mockingbird may be a perfect novel. Some literary-scholar types roll their eyes at its sentimentality; they would prefer for a novel about race and class in the South to be radical and inconsolably angry. But this novel, Lee's only one, cuts the heart open with the delicate precision of a scalpel and lays domestic life bare in all its lovely and terrible intimacy.

I love books that stage the high drama of the epic in scenes of the utterly quotidian; the observations seem all the more profound and expert. Some people conjecture that Capote wrote the book and attributed it to Lee, but the film makes clear that Capote was busy with his own book at the time of its composition and that he would have been loathe to give up credit for the success of Mockingbird. And anyway, his style is different. Mockingbird utterly lacks the note of the bizarre one would hear in Capote; it is pitch perfect.

I also liked the way the movie dramatized Lee's role in Capote's life as a friend--how precious and irreplaceable it was, how it made him into something he would not have been otherwise. I was thinking this morning about friends from North Carolina, and missing them was almost overpowering for a few moments. If I had moved away from a boyfriend or were separated from a spouse by distance in my recent move, there might have been familiar, commonly accepted procedures for how to handle the separation, however insufficient they might have been. I think everyone would have expected me to grieve the loss. But I haven't quite figured out how to move on from what I've left behind, or how to carry it forward. What did I leave? Oh, the feeling of walking into the Betts' house on Monday nights and feeling my spirits rise when I saw all those beaming faces. Or seeing Joan and Frank's car when I arrived at church and knowing they'd be inside the building. Or sitting in my office and then hearing Jen's or Lindsey's key in the lock. Or knocking on door B20 and happily anticipating that it would open to someplace I loved to be, no matter what kind of day I'd been having.