Strange collisions of truth and fiction occur in this fictionalized story of Truman Capote’s greatest novelistic endeavor, the writing of In Cold Blood. The movie is Infamous. Capote tells lies to and breaks confidences from his friends. He professes to one set that his book is his consuming motivation and to another set that compassion for the people in the book is his motivation. As one viewer was overheard to say about Truman in Infamous, “He tells a lot of lies to a lot of people. I don’t know which view of him to trust.”
Infamous is a partially fictionalized account of Truman Capote’s research and writing of In Cold Blood, a book that made a sensation because of the gruesome tale and the manner in which the tale was told. Capote turned standard reportage (reporting) into drama by incorporating elements of literature into a factual account. An example from Infamous was the way Truman turned the statement, “right at the end, I thought he’s a nice man” into the literary phrase “right up until the end, I thought he was a nice, soft spoken gentleman.” Not only is the language changed, but actually the entire concept is changed since “right at the end” describes an event at a precise moment in time, but “right up until the end” describes an event covering and extended span of time.
In restaurants full of the glamor and wealth of New York in the late 1950’s, Truman Capote , in Infamous,is introduced in the company of various members of his Swans, the beautiful, pampered and unhappy rich women and wives of ritzy, glitz New York. In this swirl of satin, lace, linen and silk, Truman reads an AP news story about a gruesome cold blooded murder in a small back road town of Kansas. Truman has been developing a new approach to writing about true events and wants to make this event his next piece for The New Yorker magazine. Of course, the article for The New Yorker turns into a book, In Cold Blood.
As Infamous unfolds, Truman goes to Small Town, Kansas in all his New York finery and finds himself in unfamiliar territory. As it happens, the criminals are apprehended while he and his best friend Nell Harper Lee, who accompanied him, are still there, and of course it becomes essential to Truman’s quest for psychological truths that he meet these apprehended criminals.
Gwenyth Paltrow who plays nightclub singer Kitty Dean, provides one of the brightest moments in Infamous, which abounds with bright moments. Her performance, showing just the right touch of Virginia Mayo, combines expressiveness with brevity and winds up as beauty. Sandra Bullock is perfectly cast as Nell Harper Lee, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird. And she almost pulls the heavily serious role off perfectly, but she drops both her character and her accent from time to time (but, she’s in good company since Scarlett Johannson has the same sort of troubles in The Prestige). Toby Jones, the undoubtable star of Infamous, as Truman Capote, brings authenticity to an difficult eccentric character, more so since Capote had so many extraordinary traits. What could have been an awkward portrayal of unusual qualities was instead a performance productive of genuine regard.
Commendable for it’s acting, Infamous, directed and written by Douglas McGrath (Nicolas Nickleby) has even more to commend it. The sets (Judy Becker) and camera shots (Bruno Delbonnel) are dazzling and beautiful. The directing (McGrath) and editing (Camilla Toniolo) make precise jigsaw puzzle pictures out of shots that hop from one confidential conversation to another conversation breaching that confidence to another conversation enlarging on that breach. And then – Truman goes to Kansas.
A comment I heard in the theater was that Infamous is “Definitely R rated; very R rated.” Infamous is not for the faint of heart nor the easily impressionable. Even though it contains nothing as ludicrously extreme as The Departed, it nonetheless has scenes that impressionable people will not want living within their memories. This may be particularly true because these were real events from 1963, not fiction (although the caveat states they are fictionalized), which brings up two inescapable subjects of Infamous, one a controversial one, that being capital punishment. Is it punishment, as Perry (Daniel Craig) suggests? Or is it reparation of a rend in the fabric of civilization?
Second of these subjects is the relationship between those who brutalize and those who suffer brutalization. The attacked one always in some strange way comes to idolize and emulate the attacker. This truth is seen in at least two of the personal stories that are told in Infamous. Maybe it is because the attacker, whether present or not, becomes the central focus of the attacked person’s life, the point around which every thought and reaction pivot. Infamous, as it tells Capote’s story, explores the strange and otherwise inexplicable behaviors that result from this adhering tendency.
Infamous is definitely R rated, to quote the theater-goer. Infamous is not for everyone. But it is an almost perfectly done film (too bad Sandra Bullock couldn’t quite carry it off one hundred percent of the time). The Swans seem to overdo the shallow New York socialite, so that the shallowness at times seems shallow to the point of put-on (it is an acting faux pas to seem to be acting – which is one reason The Producers is less appealing on film). Infamous will most likely be an Academy Award contender in many categories. But because there are weaknesses in some of the character portrayals, I rate Infamous as a 4 1/2.
