1:11 a.m. Sunday night, Monday morning

Only three theaters were showing Capote in the entire Atlanta metro area. (And to think that I had applauded the city earlier in the week for a Wyeth exhibit at the High Museum.) We went to the Cathedral in the city for Mass, and decided to sponge in a little culture before heading back to the suburbs. We found one of the three theaters, and settled in with the three other people who went to see the film. (I'm not kidding. There were only five people in the entire place.)

I liken the movie to The Passion, in that it is not a "popcorn" film. Capote befriends a prisoner he's interviewing about the murders of four people. But therein lies the conflict--he's writing a book that can't be published until the killer dies. In some dark place in the Capote psyche, he desires the death of his subject in order to be able to write the ending of his book. His newfound killer friend pleads for his help finding another lawyer, but in his own self-interest, Capote refuses. He never recovers from what he feels is a self-serving betrayal.

He's there to witness the execution, and he is never the same afterwards. After the so-called "non-fiction novel" is released, it inevitably makes him famous. But he never publishes anything afterwards, and dies of alcoholism in 1984. In the epigraph of all his later, unfinished works, he writes, "More tears are shed from answered prayers than unanswered ones."

The whole premise unsettled me as I rode home in the rain, hydroplaning and worrying about getting pulled over just for the fact that I was on the road at midnight on a Sunday. (That's suspicious.) The film is a frenetic study of the human condition--at one point Truman compares his own childhood with that of the killer. Very similar, indeed. Abandonment interspersed with abuse. He says that he feels as if he's grown up in the same house as the killer, but one day, the killer walked out the back door, and he walked out the front. What is it exactly that pushes one person over the edge, while another, under the same conditions, remains sane enough to function normally in society? It was completely evocative of Lord of the Flies, except that its setting is late 1950's America and every scene contained a bottle of gin.

Winding homeward on the wet, dark Georgia roads, I became more apprehensive about why I'd had that Capote dream seven years ago in Iceland. I think it serves as a friendly warning that has taken this long to materialize. ("Go ahead and write," it says. "But be prepared: behind and underneath what you will mildly and coquettishly call "research," reside the lives you must be willing to divulge and sacrifice for a good story." )