Better In Your Head?--OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS

 

Spoiler Alert: what in the illegitimate fuck?

THE BOOK-Written by Truman Capote, released 1948

THE MOVIE-Directed by David Rocksavage, written by Rocksavage & Sara Flanigan, released 1997

THE STORY-A dirty dry summer. A lonely boy. A link in a chain that must break. A ball of yarn that must be caught. By seeking a man, he becomes a man.

MIND THE GAP-Capote's first novel is a semi-autobiographical Southern Gothic magic trick. Fringe dwellers, fueled by repression and the aggression which springs forth like delirious bullfrogs at the scantiest stimulus. Golden.

The debut flick of director Rocksavage is as dismaying as his last name is awesome. I was unfamiliar with the entirety of the cast, and I yearn to return to that paradisaical time. David Speck plays pretty boy Joel Knox as well as I play ice hockey. Aubrey Dollar plays rough-hewn tomboy Idabel, a role which might've registered were it not dreadfully underdeveloped. The most pivotal character, Rudolph, is an unmitigated disaster thanks to Lothaire Blueteau, a man whose name casts everything he does and says in a dubious light. Per Capote: "Randolph speaks without any accent...his weary voice was free of regional dialects...." Bluteau, problem is, speaks in several accents here, sometimes within a single sentence. (I heard French-Canadian, Irish and Creole, a combination as palatable to the ear as a bowl of corned beef, crawfish and cheese curds is to the tongue.)

"Swamp honey" was the name of the first lesbian porno I ever watched. Hah, nah, just kidding. It wasn't the first. 

Capote's ending isn't easily absorbed. It may defy evaluation, at trail's end. Can a thirteen-year-old boy truly make such a critical decision of his own volition? Shouldn't Randolph--an adult--discourage him? Or is reaching out to a lonely soul so plainly desperate for connection the most moral move?

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-Dud backwards is dud. Watching Other Voices, Other Rooms backwards is preferable, probably. What a drastic waste of my time! A movie made to collect a bet, or settle a debt. Why adapt an essentially plotless book that's 98% atmosphere created by the author's evocative gifts, anyway? And why cast actors who appear unable to comprehend the words they say and/or why they're saying those words? Why alter the ending? Wait, lemme reword: Why betray Capote's story? 

If not for obligation, I woulda shut this sophomoric claptrap off ten minutes in. Meanwhile, it took me an hour longer to read OV,OR than it shoulda 'cause I re-read particular paragraphs just to marvel over Capote's brilliance--and to hammer home the hard fact I will never, ever write so well.