Ebs Burnough’s doc centres on Truman Capote’s unfinished novel but its real intrigue is its subject’s unknowable psyche
There’s a necrophiliac fascination to this documentary about the life and times of Truman Capote, author of the 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s – filmed with Audrey Hepburn – and the true-crime reportage masterpiece In Cold Blood from 1966. The latter was about the brutal slaying of a Kansas farming family in which the cold-bloodedness of the crime was matched by the cold-bloodedness of Capote’s literary and journalistic performance – befriending the culprits with
prison visits and privately agitating for their death penalty to give his book a sensational ending. If anyone had the splinter of ice in the heart that Graham Greene said a novelist needed, it was him.
Related: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood at 50