New film retells Capote tale

'Infamous' similar but plays differently than Oscar nominee

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 13, 2006 at midnight

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Director Doug McGrath had the misfortune to become fascinated with precisely the same subject that informed last year's Oscar-nominated Capote. Like that movie, McGrath's Infamous takes place during the years in which the famed author reported and wrote In Cold Blood. More particularly, both movies are keenly attuned to the writer's obsession with killer Perry Smith.

It's impossible to know how we might have reacted to McGrath's Infamous had there been no Capote, and those who saw the earlier movie definitely will be watching two movies simultaneously, perhaps playing unavoidable games in which one movie seems to trump the other.

As it turns out, there's probably room for both. Although similar to Capote, which I think is the better movie, Infamous often plays quite differently, and there are at least two reasons why.

To begin with, McGrath expands Capote's New York milieu, showing him as a kind of society pet and irrepressible raconteur. His pals - Bennett Cerf, Slim Keith, Marella Agnelli, Diana Vreeland and Babe Paley - either are seen talking directly to the camera about Capote or participating in scenes centering on Capote's famous wit or his appetite for gossip.

In its early going, Infamous easily could be mistaken for a slickly mounted satire about the rich and richer. Juliet Stevenson's Vreeland, for example, has a spot-on, bracing quality that snaps the movie to attention whenever she's on screen. Go ahead and laugh. In the early going, Infamous can be generously entertaining and quite funny.

But McGrath gradually blends serious ingredients into this comic souffle of chatter and gloss. Some 45 minutes into the picture, Capote - accompanied by longtime friend Harper Lee - visits the Clutter house, scene of the famous murder in which Dick Hickcock and Perry Smith killed a Midwestern family of four, the brutal and pathetic result of a failed robbery attempt.

This brings us to the second, and equally important, distinction between Infamous and its predecessor. McGrath speculates that the relationship between Smith (played by Daniel Craig) and Capote (portrayed by British actor Toby Jones) didn't resemble love: It was love, complete with a suggestive kiss in Smith's cell.

McGrath says that his interpretation results from trying to understand why Capote's writing career faded after In Cold Blood. The director told me in an interview that George Plimpton's Truman Capote, a principal source of material for the movie, contained an account in which someone pointed out that Capote bribed prison guards to stay away so that he and Smith could have sex.

This leaves us to conclude that an impossible love accounted for Capote's decline. I can't say that the film convinced me of the rightness of its interpretation, nor can I say that Jones, who looks more like Capote than Capote's Philip Seymour Hoffman, matched Hoffman's Oscar-winning performance. Jones emphasizes Capote's skin-deep qualities as a man of mincing flamboyance. Yet, seeing Capote as a diminutive man who charmed most of his companions has its own merit.

Oddly, Sandra Bullock's portrayal of Lee, the novelist who wrote To Kill A Mocking Bird, has gotten more attention than Jones' as Capote. Her interpretation feels sadder and softer than Katherine Keener's. Wouldn't it be strange if Bullock received a supporting Oscar nomination for playing the same role as Keener, who last year also was nominated in that category?

Bullock functions less as the movie's conscience (a role Keener played) than as its broken heart. And, yes, she's exceptionally good, further encouraging those of us who thought she was equally impressive as the furious wife of a district attorney in Crash.

Craig presents a Perry Smith unlike any other. After Robert Blake's brilliant work in the movie version of In Cold Blood, Smith typically has been portrayed as weirdly sensitive, a wounded spirit trapped in a killer's body. Craig portrays Smith in harsher tones, showing flashes of anger, intelligence and vulnerability.

At times the movie shuttles Capote back to New York, a tactic that can feel digressive, particularly in a section in which Weaver's Paley talks about her husband's infidelity.

The final scenes of McGrath's movie are appropriately somber, and in the end, we're left with plenty of grist for the Capote mill. I'm not sure whether audiences are ready for two journeys to Kansas with Capote, but we've got them. As such, they afford a rare opportunity to approach the same subject from different angles and see just how much new light is shed.

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