Venice diary – 'Infamous' review

Dave Calhoun gives his opinion on the second Truman Capote film of the year.

Aug 31 2006

You have to feel sorry for the makers of 'Infamous', the second film about Truman Capote to emerge in less than a year. The cameras rolled on 'Infamous' - which stars British stage actor Toby Jones as the effete novelist and Bond-to-be Daniel Craig as murderer Perry Smith - around the same time as 'Capote', which, as we all know, granted Philip Seymour Hoffman the Oscar and film-goers everywhere temporary licence to exit the cinema with their feet slightly closer together than when they entered. 'Capote' took the glory; 'Infamous' took to the shelf.

Now, 'Infamous' has opened the 'Orizzonti' strand of the Venice Film Festival, and the good news is that it's not a bad effort; Jones rivals Hoffman for intelligent mimicry and the film's reliance on the first-person testimonies of George Plimpton's biography (which allows for amusing talking-head turns from Sigourney Weaver, Peter Bogdanovich and Hope Davis, among others) offers a sparky insight into Capote's rarefied
social world.

The bad news, though, is that 'Infamous', in its focus on the writing of 'In Cold Blood' and Capote's ambiguous, varied motives for completing that work, is in many ways a carbon copy of the concerns and themes of 'Capote'. Worse, it doesn't handle those same concerns as well as its predecessor. All this, of course, is the fault largely of coincidence (the two scripts were written independently and without prior knowledge of each other's existence), but 'Infamous' still remains a work that is largely redundant.

Which is not to say that 'Infamous' is not enjoyable. Its screenplay by writer/director Douglas McGrath is compelling - but it lacks the subtlety of Bennett Miller's ambiguous, precarious treading over this Manhattan socialite's sojourn to the wheat plains and prison corridors of Kansas to write a novel inspired by a news clipping from the New York Times about a pair of cold-blooded killers. McGrath is bolder in his assumptions than Miller: his Capote kisses Smith (and vice versa) when they're alone before the latter's execution. But such boldness is to the film's detriment.

All that was painted grey in 'Capote' becomes black-and-white in 'Infamous'. It's an inferior approach to a character as complicated, as multi-faced as Truman Capote.

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