A curious second interpretation of author Truman Capote’s making of In Cold Blood, Douglas McGrath’s Infamous revisits the tragic murders and birth of a literary masterpiece first detailed in Capote. It is one of thirty films presented at this year’s World Cinema Showcase in March and April. TIM WONG reviews.


HOW NOT TO compare Infamous to Capote? That’s the unavoidable truth behind Douglas McGrath’s new movie about the making of In Cold Blood – the second in as many years. Conceived around the same time as Dan Futterman’s script for the Bennett Miller-directed film, both versions seek out the same macabre murder mystery: Truman Capote’s excursion to Kansas to investigate the Clutter family homicide, his meeting with the killers, the uncomfortably close relationship forged with Perry Smith, and the devastation and creative stasis that followed. If Infamous is a different interpretation, it is a queerer one: a campier rendition of Capote, more irresistibly the life of parties, more likely to be mistaken for a woman. Gleefully, all those Breakfast at Tiffany’s-inspired apartment soirees feature more prominently this time around in a film that revels in the author’s social magnetism. A persistent name-dropper, it’s also fitting that Gwyneth Paltrow, Sigourney Weaver, Isabella Rossellini, and Hope Davis get to form his haute circle of girlfriends in a world of cribbed gossip and embellished Hollywood tales that travel (and morph) as quickly from Brando to Sinatra to Bogey.

Surprisingly jovial in tone for film about grisly murder, Capote’s gay pride nevertheless makes way for darker currents, namely his all-consuming infatuation with the enigmatic Smith, played here by Daniel Craig with a brutish, caged heat. Their attraction to one another is certainly more overt – sometimes touching, but mostly forced – while lacking is the damaged vulnerability of Clifton Collins Jr’s performance, an absence of nuance that isn’t isolated to Craig’s role, and seems to afflict the film’s other characterizations on a whole. Toby Jones, halfway between a Munchkin and Peter Lorre, is a far closer physical resemblance to the real life Capote than the stockier Philip Seymour Hoffman was; the lisp is more pronounced, the body language even fruitier, and yet mislaid is the deep torment and manipulative charm harnessed so brilliantly in Hoffman’s Oscar-winning turn. Sandra Bullock, rather absurd in Crash, is fine as Harper Lee, but is no Catherine Keener either; her predecessor crafting a subtler groove with less words and more feeling as Truman’s devoted comrade grappling with her own literary path to glory. Miller’s film cut right to the bone of their combative friendship, no better fleshed out than in the scene where Capote questions Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird success. In Infamous, Bullock and Jones exchange words to the same effect, albeit minus the deep-rooted hurt.

However many dots we join together, competing directors Miller and McGrath make one clear distinction in the end: Infamous is a biopic; Capote is deliberately not. What’s intriguing about the latter is that exists within a literary mythology: its characters are like apparitions, emerging from the Kansas twilight, one hand on the allure of the truth, the other with a firm grasp of the unreal. Infamous accurately and efficiently, if not routinely outlays the remnants of Capote’s true-crime masterpiece: a fascinating study all the same, but in portraying an author who had a strange understanding of the concept of ‘non-fiction’, such a direct treatment of the material could be considered outmoded and besides the point. Always the center of attention though, I hardly think Truman is rolling in his grave over the prospect to two movies fighting over his feted legacy and name.