Susan Granger’s review of “Infamous” (Warner Independent Pictures)
Timing is everything. Last year, “Capote” won accolades – and a Best Actor Oscar for Philip Seymour Hoffman. Now, “Infamous,” also about Truman Capote’s writing “In Cold Blood,” isn’t attracting the same kind of attention – yet it’s actually a better movie.
Dispensing the droll wit of diminutive Truman Capote, British actor Toby Jones is a whiny, sophisticated elf – and he’s surrounded by a bevy of 1960’s Manhattan cafŽ society ladies – Sigourney Weaver as Babe Paley, Hope Davis as Slim Keith, Juliet Stevenson as Diana Vreeland and Isabella Rossellini as Marella Agnelli – with best friend/confidante Nelle Harper Lee (who wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird”) played with sublime subtlety by Sandra Bullock. Scuttling among his “swans,” as he called them, Capote shrewdly traded confidences like currency – only to betray them all later in “Answered Prayers.”
The primary difference between the two versions is that writer/director Douglas McGrath (“Emma”) adapted his effervescent script from a gossipy George Plimpton oral history collage, filled with insightful interviews, while “Capote” screenwriter relied on Janet Malcolm’s serious, factual “The Journalist and the Murderer.” McGrath also imagines the shamelessly manipulative munchkin cultivating a homosexual relationship with incarcerated convicted killer Perry Smith, played by Daniel Craig, who will soon be seen as the new James Bond in “Casino Royale.”
Jeff Daniels is Alvin Dewey, the Holcomb, Kansas, prosecutor; (director) Peter Bogdonovich is ebullient Random House publisher Bennett Cerf; and Gwyneth Paltrow opens the movie as a Manhattan nightclub chanteuse. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Infamous” is an amusing, illustrious 8. Coupled with “Capote,” it offers a unique opportunity to see the same “In Cold Blood” background story as interpreted by two disparate filmmakers.as a double-feature, it could be “Infamous Capote.”
