a review of J. Robert Parks
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Writer / Director – Douglas McGrath.
Based on the book by George Plimpton
Director of photography – Bruno Delbonnel
Editor – Camilla Toniolo
Music – Rachel Portman
Production designer – Judy Becker
Producers – Christine Vachon, Jocelyn Hayes and Anne Walker-McBay
Warner Independent Pictures. 118 minutes. Rated R for foul language, violence, and sexual references and situations.
STARRING: Toby Jones (Truman Capote), Sandra Bullock (Nelle Harper Lee), Daniel Craig (Perry Smith), Peter Bogdanovich (Bennett Cerf), Jeff Daniels (Alvin Dewey), Hope Davis (Slim Keith), Gwyneth Paltrow (Kitty Dean), Isabella Rossellini (Marella Agnelli), Juliet Stevenson (Diana Vreeland), Sigourney Weaver (Babe Paley), John Benjamin Hickey (Jack Dunphy), Michael Panes (Gore Vidal) and Lee Pace (Dick Hickock).
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Infamous begins with a crackerjack scene featuring a cameo appearance by Gwyneth Paltrow as lounge singer Kitty Dean performing “What is This Thing Called Love?” As the lyrics reach the point in the story where the singer is abandoned, art appears to intrude upon life. Dean’s voice cracks. The band stops. The audience murmurs sympathetically. Then, with a sly grin, Dean picks up the song again. Truman Capote (Toby Smith) is in the audience, and his smile at Dean’s performance indicates a delight at having been taken in. Give him interesting fiction over dull reality any day.
The rest of Douglas McGrath’s unfortunately timed docufiction never quite lives up to the layered nuance or relative subtlety of the first scene. I say, “relative,” because the point isn’t likely to be lost on most attentive viewers, so it isn’t exactly subtle to begin with. It’s more subtle, though, than the “interviews” given directly to the camera by the principals whenever the film isn’t quite sure how to convey a character detail or stress the meaning of a dramatic scene that has already played out.
The interviews were more reminiscent of When Harry Met Sally than Reds, and Capote’s fish-out-of-water antics in Kansas evoked more of The Birdcage than Brokeback Mountain. Writer/director McGrath has a sure hand when dealing with the sentimental (Emma) or even the conventionally melodramatic (Nicholas Nickleby), but this material is darker no matter how you slice it – and it seems to get sliced up several different ways.
For a while, it appears that we will be served up a slice of “what is real and what is staged?” meta-irony. Capote charms the stoic Alvin Dewey with tales of beating Humphrey Bogart at arm wrestling, promptly loses to Dewey’s son (to make the boy feel better about himself), then beats Dewey to prove he wasn’t faking all along. Unfortunately, by the time we get to the buzz-inducing kiss between Capote and Perry Smith we’ve not only lost track of what’s supposed to be real and what is feigned, we’ve also forgotten why we should care.
We get slices of many – perhaps too many – other themes: the vagrancies of the human heart, the horrific premeditation of the death penalty, the sacrifice required to create great art. Capote’s nonfiction novel is rich in detail and filled with irony and foreshadowing. Because the story of the Clutters’ final day is understandably cut, they appear only as victims, and the depiction of their murder comes across as being much more exploitative than it did in Capote. The details of Smith’s and Hickock’s meanderings after the crime are also not developed. Only Smith’s biographical details relating to his father are included from the biographical components of In Cold Blood, and these scenes neither serve to soften Perry here nor help explain Capote’s own fascination with him.
Infamous‘s biggest flaw, ultimately, though, does not stem from its writing or directing choices. The total lack of chemistry between Smith and Capote means the film is built on the foundation of a relationship that is described by all the witnesses but which never takes flight when the principals are on screen together. Some connection is made between the principles at first sight, but while Capote apparently found Smith tragically fascinating in real life, here Smith just seems like a sad sack, more dopey than dangerous – until he slits Clutter’s throat.
Before there was Hannibal the Cannibal or Saw or The Exorcist, Truman Capote was using the Clutters’ murders to question how God could allow evil to thrive and innocence to suffer. In his book, he relates Smith saying to Hickock: “Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will – depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do?” Much of the sympathy conveyed towards Smith, in other words, comes from his representative status as an impotent human at the whims of the inscrutable will of God or victim of the callous determinism of the universe. Before Jules in Pulp Fiction allowed his theological reading of a stray bullet to prompt his retirement, Capote had Smith reporting that the fortunate appearance of a hitchhiker who interrupted his own murderous plans was a “goddam miracle.”
In Cold Blood, in other words, is painfully aware of the universal questions that its subject matter drags from our repressed psyches. Why do some live and some die? Why does the universe conspire to deliver some of us from evil while it stands mute and indifferent at the slaughter of others? Last year’s Capote understood that these questions were central to our fascination with this material, and it played off them through the scene in which Capote lifts the coffin lids at the mortuary to take a hard look at what makes the squeamish among us wish to look away. The questions raised by Infamous are less primal, and hence less interesting. Perhaps it could have brought insight into one question it toys with: what makes life worth living? But its answer here – caviar – is too pat to satisfy and too simplistic to really explain. The Clutters were as far removed from Capote’s socialite world as was Smith, but Capote’s book makes it clear that it was with Smith and his “outsider” status that he sympathized. Infamous is complicit with Capote’s scorn at the Holcumb residents, but it never quite picks up on his resentment of the Clutters as a symbol of all that which he disdains and yet longs for acceptance from.
What we are left with, then, is a pastiche of details from other sources that only really resonates when it extends beyond itself to elicit the memory of something better. Smith’s performance is solid, but his Capote remains emotionally distant from the audience and more seemingly detached from the events around him than did Philip Seymour Hoffman’s. Perhaps I would have appreciated the film had it not been for the inevitable comparisons to Capote, but I doubt it.
Morefield’s Grade: C
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Kenneth R. Morefield is an Assistant Professor of English at Campbell University.