CAPOTE AND DATE MOVIE

Some cinematic seasons throw up abstract questions. In the early 1990s a clutch of movies asked: What is adulthood? Children found themselves in the bodies of adults, and vice versa. Adults left children home alone. Children were shrunk by careless fathers. Babies started talking with the voice of John Travolta. It may be vocational myopia on my part, but this year I hear the question “What is a writer?” In Hidden (released in the United States as Caché) the answer is painful: writers are petty bourgeois. In Good Night, and Good Luck it’s the writer as hero, noble champion of the people. In Casanova she’s a harmless firebrand, in Memoirs of a Geisha, a naïf who simply records events as they happen. In both Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and Walk the Line the writer is an alchemist, turning pain into gold.

Why all the sudden concern with scribblers? Writers like to flatter themselves that in times of communal trauma people turn to the written word for comfort and direction. Maybe once. But in the noughties we’ve begun to legislate against language itself: writers are not to be trusted. They are double-dealers. For this reason, Capote, despite its 1950s setting, is timely. When people rail against the “media,” the bogeymen they have in mind owe not a little to the specter of Truman Capote. What is a writer? He knocks on your door with a smile, a pen and a shard of ice in his heart. Around that shard Philip Seymour Hoffman molds his tremendous Capote impersonation, by turns fey, friendly, oleaginous, deadly. He is Janus-faced. In New York, he’s a quixotic queen laughing in smoky nightclubs at the stupidity of his own readers; in Holcomb, Kansas, he does a damn good impression of being the boy next door. He’ll turn up at the sheriff’s house early in the morning with doughnuts and coffee, find the sheriff’s wife alone and explain he came on a whim to eat breakfast with her. She wanders off to get plates. Slowly the camera and Hoffman slink to the left into a side room where little Perry Smith, multiple murderer, is locked up in a cell.

The sea change that comes over Hoffman’s face during this pan shot is as close as silence comes to narrative. His Capote coolly dissembles, yet he is impassioned; he lied to get into the house, and yet he came to uncover truths. He is a writer: a man who tells the truth by lying. An actor of Hoffman’s caliber, who also tells the truth that way, can’t help but have a deep understanding of writerly psychology. “When I think of how good it could be,” wrote Capote of his unwritten book, “I can hardly breathe.” When Hoffman says these lines-sexually, venally, desperately-you fear him and yourself. How far will he go for a good story? How far will you go with him to hear it?

Hoffman has been vocal in his praise of the writer, Dan Futterman, and director, Bennett Miller, but this is an actor’s traditional demurral: the lion’s share of the praise belongs to Hoffman. Everything looks lovely and period and prestige, but shots linger ponderously, keen that we should fully appreciate them, as predictable a tic of a first-time director as the first-time novelist compulsively inserting adjectives. It’s the acting that sings, especially when Hoffman duets with luminous Catherine Keener (playing another writer, Harper Lee), the lady with the loveliest laugh in cinema. Hoffman’s writer is a self-serving egoist; Keener’s a restrained, wise soul. But just as in life, cinema’s Capote trumps Harper Lee. We admire those who refrain, but we make movies about personae. Capote’s persona was enormous and, unusually, his talent was almost its equal. Yet we still tell Capote’s story with pity and use his life as a parable: talent can’t buy you morals. The film implies Truman couldn’t finish another book after In Cold Blood because he never got over his betrayal of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. To my mind, the problem was less moral and more writerly: stage fright. Capote stumbled across a true story that suited him perfectly and dressed himself up in it to fabulous effect. Without it, he felt naked.

I could have seen a lot of good films this week. I chose Date Movie, and actually I’m thankful because it allows me to say with certainty something I had not decided until this moment: Date Movie is the worst movie I have ever seen. I really mean that. Forty minutes in, I fled the cinema feeling dazed, aggrieved and strangely weepy, as if a stranger had just physically threatened me. I took Date Movie personally. The actress who stars in it means a lot to me. She is Alyson Hannigan, a petite redhead with goofy good looks, who cos-tarred in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the only TV show I have truly loved. I have tried to convince people that she is one of the finest tragicomic actresses in L.A. I have persisted in this despite American Pie and its sequels. At the very least, I expected her to step effortlessly into the shoes Meg Ryan left empty. Ms. Hannigan shares Ms. Ryan’s triumvirate of talents-quick wit, deep soul and gummy smile-and is happily free of the emotional neediness with which Ms. Ryan occasionally oppresses the audience. When I dared to dream, I pictured Alyson at a podium, thanking her parents. But there will be no prizes for Date Movie. The very fact of its existence forces a wedge between Alyson and anything resembling mainstream or indie Hollywood. And for that she has Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer to thank, two “filmmakers” whom I can only name and shame in the full knowledge it will not stop them.

In the first forty minutes of Date Movie, Hannigan beats up a homeless man for sport, wears a grotesque fat suit, watches a cat eat a dead woman’s face, has a carpet of ginger hair waxed from her backside and takes part in a parody of The Bachelor, in which women the bachelor “doesn’t want to bang” are “eliminated” by submachine gun. The humor is so broad it’s less than human-it’s the laughter of monkeys as they fall out of trees. To imagine the audience for this film, one has to envision new levels of adolescent nullity. Who are these kids? Why are they evolving backward? American Pie was an amusing gross-out. Scary Movie was a gross-out, funny piece of nothing. Date Movie is less than nothing. It’s a new concept in crap: a film that is in itself an absence of film. For Hannigan, it’s cinema suicide. The worst humiliation comes when she sits opposite her date as he laboriously spoofs the orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. Eventually he finishes. Hannigan says: “I’ll have what he’s having.” As a metacomment on Hannigan’s career, it’s the cruelest joke of all. And yes, I know this movie wasn’t meant for me, but I’m repulsed by the children it’s meant for and dread the adults they will become. On the Internet the little darlings are legion, defending Date Movie against all attackers. I reproduce one such review: “OK I’m a 13-year-old girl and I thought the movie was hillarious [sic]. That kind of stuff is what kids joke about and talk about now a days [sic]. Its [sic] a comedy so stop acting like a 50-year-old spinster with a stick up your ass and get on with your life.”