Atlanta Journal
by Eleanor Ringel Gillespie
2006
A not-so-funny thing happened to "Infamous" on the way to movie theaters.
It was called "Capote."
The second film in little more than a year (they were shot at about the same time) on the same topic, director Douglas McGrath's take on Truman Capote's struggle to write "In Cold Blood" arrives with a singularly large monkey on its back. Its predecessor earned five Oscar nominations, including a win for its star, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
However, McGrath's approach couldn't be more different. The 2005 film was an emotional and psychological study that raised questions about the writer's motives and ethics. "Infamous" veers wildly between some very effective high comedy/social satire and intermittently effective melodrama with a special — spelled-out, you might say — emphasis on the homoerotic tension between Capote (Toby Jones) and one of the killers, Perry Smith (Daniel Craig).
As if to set the jaunty tone, McGrath even makes his star's entrance a sight gag. Capote arrives at a posh Manhattan nightclub (Gwyneth Paltrow is the chanteuse) with Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver), who looks to be triple his size. She's one of his so-called "swans," along with Hope Davis as Slim Keith and Juliet Stevenson as Diana Vreeland. Society matrons with too much money and too much time on their hands, they wine and dine the diminutive author in return for gossip, bitchy bon mots and, thanks to neglectful husbands, a little much-needed attention.
This aspect of "Infamous" works wonderfully, whether they're all learning the Twist at a dinner party or swearing their mincing confidant to secrecy after a particularly juicy revelation. "It will die inside me," he melodramatically proclaims to Paley after one such tidbit.
Capote comes across a small newspaper item about the slaughter of the Clutter family while listening to Doris Day sing "Teacher's Pet" (a nice touch). He sets off for Kansas intending to write an article for The New Yorker. Instead, six long years later, he publishes his seminal work, "In Cold Blood," the first nonfiction novel.
Once he gets to the Midwest, the movie's arch tone becomes tiresome and, more importantly, out of place. "Infamous" needlessly condescends to the locals, suggesting the only way a sophisticate like Capote could get through to them was by name-dropping Sinatra and Bogart. And the exchanges with Smith don't ring as true as they did in the earlier picture — though Craig (who probably dreams of the day he's no longer identified as "the new 007") is quite powerful.
Sandra Bullock plays Harper Lee, who runs interference for her flamboyant childhood pal when he insists on strolling down the street dressed like he just dropped in from Oz. At first, her accent is more Tennessee (Williams) than Alabama, but as she settles into the role, she gives a lovely, unaffected performance. Dowdily dressed, dragging on one cigarette after another, she even manages an odd little lope that's somehow completely right.
If Hoffman hadn't gotten there first, everyone would be talking about Jones' portrayal, including, perhaps Academy Award voters. He has the dual advantage of being a relative unknown — though he's a celebrated stage actor in England — and having a startling physical resemblance to the admittedly startling-looking Capote. Jones finds the comedy in the character with impressive nuance and captures the duplicity and greedy ego that can propel an author to do his best work. We watch him trying out lines on his ladies who lunch, measuring which supposed quote garners the best reaction. If he doesn't quite give us Capote's complexity, well, neither does the movie.
Then again, consider what Vreeland says by way of explaining her friendship with the decidedly untrustworthy writer: "You can forgive a person a lot if he enjoys you."
Similarly, you can forgive "Infamous" a lot because it so enjoys Truman Capote.
Source
|
