The movie was Capote, and it left me stunned.
We sat in the front row, and the whole time I was watching, I just kept thinking, "This is so good, this is so good, this is so good, this is so dark, I can't believe I'm watching this with my grandparents, oh my goodness, this is so dark."
The movie hit me hard because, at the time, I was also trying to write something based on a real-life story with no conclusion. I thought I knew what the most dramatically satisfying outcome would be, and it was the one I would never have wished on my characters, let alone their real-life counterparts. Watching Capote (brilliantly embodied by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman) wishing for a speedy conclusion to In Cold Blood really shook me. He knew what a speedy conclusion would mean for the murderers he'd befriended. Befriended. That was another thing. More and more and more shades of dark, dark grey. I could not believe I was there with my grandparents.
The credits rolled and we sat through every single one. The lights came up and we filed out of the theater in silence. What now? I wondered. What could we possibly do now?
"That was good," said my grandfather. "What's for dinner?"
I trailed behind everyone next door to the restaurant. ("He'll get an Academy Award," my dad was predicting. Everyone was nodding in agreement.) Was this my first brush with a conflicted, sympathetic, difficult protagonist? I doubt it, and I doubt that the crime itself threw me, although that certainly was a doozy, even for the seasoned Masterpiece Mystery and forties film noir consumer I was even then. Whatever the reason, this was one of the first movies I felt right down to the soles of my feet.
Roger Ebert had this to say: "The movie In Cold Blood had no speaking role for Capote, who in a sense stood behind the camera with the director. If "Capote" had simply flipped the coin and told the story of the Clutter murders from Capote's point of view, it might have been a good movie, but what makes it so powerful is that it looks with merciless perception at Capote's moral disintegration."
And I wondered, at age sixteen, whether any work of art would ever be worth that much.
So the movie got to me, but what stunned me was that "What's for dinner?" When I tell this story in person, this is where I inject the humor. "'What's for dinner?!?'" I say. "How can they be talking about food? I AM SHAKEN TO THE DEPTHS OF MY SOUL."
(I say it in all caps, just like that.)
I can point to Capote as the moment when I realized that no two people ever watch the same movie.
More than that, it would be impossible for me to watch the same movie today that I watched nine years ago. But I will never forget this particular line, "It's like Perry and I grew up in the same house, and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front," and I will never stop citing it all the time, and I will always love the movie. It's beautifully shot and well written and, yes, amazingly acted.
I'll be watching it again tomorrow.
