Truman Returns

Reviewed - Infamous:It may cover the same ground as Capote but, writes Donald Clarke, Infamousis an excellent movie in its own right.

What a nice title Douglas McGrath has found for his treatment of Truman Capote's adventures researching the book that was to become In Cold Blood. By the time Dick Hickock and Perry Smith came to be hanged for the brutal murder of a Kansas farmer and his blameless family, they had indeed gathered about them considerable infamy. But the title also refers to the fruitier, more trivial class of notoriety that attached itself to Capote himself.

McGrath's powerful, consistently well-acted film, adapted from an oral history by George Plimpton, makes excellent use of the contrast between the comic and the tragic, the frivolous and the grave. The first half of the film operates as an outrageous fish-out-of-water farce. Capote, played to perfection by the diminutive Englishman Toby Jones, notices a report of the murder in the New York Times and, kitted out in clothes few men would dare wear to a Scissor Sisters concert, makes his way to the small Midwestern town to write the definitive factual novel. There have been few sights more amusing in recent cinema than Capote's attempt to blend into his surroundings by donning an engulfing cowboy hat. Sandra Bullock, wry as the writer Harper Lee, Truman's great confidante, highlights the comedy nicely with her subtle, patient glances to the heavens.

In these sections Infamous manages to escape the vast, looming shadow cast by last year's Capote, a film that told the same story and came to similar conclusions as to the author's complicity in the killers' eventual execution. Jones, causing his voice to ape the sound of Betty Boop talking through a kazoo, creates a lighter, less lugubrious Capote than did Philip Seymour Hoffman and, as a result, Infamous's opening act is funnier and sparkier than its predecessor's.

When the killers are arrested and Truman begins his dubious friendship with Perry Smith, the more articulate of the two men, the new work does, however, begin to look and sound much more like Bennett Miller's picture. True, Daniel Craig is fearsomely charismatic as Smith and the relationship between writer and killer appears closer and more explicitly homoerotic, but, as the mood closes in, veterans of Capote will definitely feel they have been here before.

None of which is to suggest that Infamous is anything other than an excellent piece of work in its own right.

A story this good is worth telling at least twice and an appreciation of the earlier film should act as a spur rather than a disincentive to readers cautiously circling Infamous.