Infamous Reviews

[dws1982]

Van Helsing should find something to like in paragraph three of this review

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Dan Callahan, writing for Slant Magazine:

***½
In the first scene of Infamous, Truman Capote (Toby Jones) and Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver) are enjoying drinks at a swanky New York nightclub when a singer, Kitty Dean (Gwyneth Paltrow), is introduced. She begins to sing an up-tempo version of Cole Porter's "What Is This Thing Called Love?" in a small, knowing voice matched by the smug expression on her face. Let's just say that in these first few moments, you may begin to have your doubts about needing to see another movie about Truman Capote after last year's wintry Philip Seymour Hoffman court briefing. Then something surprising happens: Paltrow's singer begins to retreat from her song, finally stopping completely, staring at the audience with red, wounded eyes. The musicians halt and a hush falls over the nightclub. Paltrow sings a few childlike words a cappella, as if she's trying to locate the source of some deep trauma, then, slowly, she resumes singing the song exactly the way she began it, professionally and insincerely. Jones's Capote looks impressed and disturbed by the singer's disintegration and her soulless carrying on, as if he intuits that his own emotional problems will eventually kill his career as famous writer and society court jester.

This rather unnerving opening is emblematic of Infamous as a whole: it's risky, emotionally raw, maybe not entirely successful, but always searching and intuitive. The screenwriter and director, Douglas McGrath, has helmed two respectable literary adaptations (Emma and Nicholas Nickleby) and a Cuban Missile crisis comedy so dreadful that its stench has never quite left my nostrils (Company Man). With this ambitious film, McGrath has done a passionate job of fleshing out not only Capote but his entire milieu. Using George Plimpton's oral biography of the writer as a basis, McGrath moves constantly between New York high life and the bleak Kansas plains where Capote writes In Cold Blood. The shifts in tone are jarring at first, but the editing has all kinds of strange pleasures and echoes, connections between people, thoughts, and places. The cutting is often fast, which is why the scenes played in long takes land as hard as they do.

Sandra Bullock, who plays Capote's friend Harper Lee, has two impressive speeches that bookend the film. In the first, she remembers Capote's loneliness as a child, and the muscles in Bullock's face tighten as she recalls a specific memory where he was badly hurt. At the end of the film, she bitterly speaks about how America expects the best of you over and over again, and how hard it is to live up to early promise. We've always been presented with a picture of Lee as a sweet woman who had one book in her, delivered it, then retired into maidenly seclusion. In Infamous, Lee is boldly depicted as a blocked writer who's very angry about not being able to continue her work, and Bullock really captures her awkward kindness. Bullock has been pleasant in her forgettable star vehicles, but never striking enough to convince me she had any business on screen. Yet in Infamous, with her hair cropped, looking older, and asked to carry single-take monologues that would tax the most resourceful actress, Bullock is quietly heartbreaking. She would dominate the movie if it weren't so stuffed with other talented people doing some of their best work.

The previous Capote was a solemn, limited chamber piece and one-man show for Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won an Oscar for his work. It's an accomplished performance, but when set beside what Jones does in Infamous, it fades in comparison. Jones, a little-known British theater actor, feels exactly right for the part, physically and emotionally. Hoffman is a big man and a big actor: size is his thing. Turning himself into fey little Capote was a big act of will on his part, and justly rewarded. But Jones captures things about Capote that Hoffman could never touch, such as his lightness, his wild humor, and, most importantly, his vulnerability. We see him lying and boasting of famous friends, but he isn't condemned for his faults, as he was in Bennett Miller's version.

When Capote encounters his double, Perry Smith (Daniel Craig), a Brando-esque killer, Jones creates a perilously exposed portrait of Capote's romantic thrills and misery, feelings never touched on in the previous film. The riskiest part of Infamous is its imaginative leaps concerning Perry. Craig is uncanny here, low-voiced, overwhelmingly physical, a brute, and a poet. He looks like a bruiser, but his sensitive eyes give away his secret interior life. During a flashback to Perry's murder of the Clutter family, McGrath audaciously suggests that the sticking point lay in the jock-beauty of their young son; when his partner Dick (Lee Pace) notices Perry staring tenderly at the boy, he taunts him into the murders by calling him out as a queer. Played in silhouette, the scene builds upsettingly, but it might be one point where McGrath goes too far with his fancies about what could have happened.

However, McGrath is on the nose most of the time. In one scene of extraordinary and erotic emotional violence, Perry attacks Capote and threatens him with rape. The camera stays punishingly focused on the two actors, Jones's smallness set off against Craig's muscular brutality, with Perry trying to tear real emotion from Capote. It matches up with the first sequence, where the singer broke down, and it's clear that after falling in love with Perry and losing him, Capote can't go on singing cheerily for his supper any longer.

Infamous is a film about flashy facades and what lies beneath them; before it's over, many of the veneers we've seen have cracked apart, especially Capote's toughness and Harper Lee's wistful career hopes, not to mention the macho assurance of Capote's lover Jack Dunphy (John Benjamin Hickey), who speaks painfully of romantic betrayal. The film manages to be many things at once: an eerie ensemble comedy, an actor's showcase, and a tragic love story. Unlike its predecessor, it does Capote justice and makes a sharp case for the power and destructiveness of liberated feelings.

[VanHelsing]

I just found out that Infamous received a somewhat 10 min standing ovation after its Venice premiere.

[Damien]

New York magazine's David Edelstein comes right down the middle:

Truman, Take Two
Another exploration of In Cold Blood—this time with humor

Oh, the sad sighs that must have greeted the writer and director Douglas McGrath when he told people he was finishing a film called Infamous, about Truman Capote and the writing of In Cold Blood—at the precise moment when Philip Seymour Hoffman and the makers of Capote were racking up nominations and awards.

Of course, some of us found Capote—in spite of Hoffman’s stupendous performance—a little on the dreary side. The screenwriter, Dan Futterman, took his cues from Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, and so the movie became the story of a devious little sh it who sells his soul for a book: It was Capote’s blood that ran cold.

Well, any movie about Truman Capote with almost no sense of humor has taken a wrong turn somewhere, and Infamous gets the balance right—at least for an hour or so. As Capote, Toby Jones is dandy; I’d be praising him to the heavens if not for you-know-who. And he’s surrounded by the most delicious actors: Sigourney Weaver as Babe Paley, Hope Davis as Slim Keith, and the divine Juliet Stevenson as Diana Vreeland—who delivers an ode to eccentricity that frames Capote generously. We marvel at the man’s incorrigibility and mordant wit; we’re allowed to discover for ourselves that he’s a devious little shi t.

The problem with McGrath’s writing is that there’s no subtext. People blurt things out as fast as the words pop into their heads—great for cocktail-party repartee, not so good for feeling out murderers on Kansas’s death row. Daniel Craig brings a restlessness to Perry Smith that’s frightening and convincing, but I kept wanting to insert longer pauses in between his and Capote’s lines, maybe to bring it halfway back to Capote.

Hey, there’s a thought: If someone could edit the two movies together—a bit from one, a bit from the other, call it The Infamous Capote—we’d have the definitive story of the writing of In Cold Blood.

[Sonic Youth]

I get very uncomfortable when "voices of reason" are defined as anyone who happens to agree with our opinions.

Maybe someone honestly likes Capote and honestly dislikes Infamous.

Honeycut liked both.

[OscarGuy]

I think Tee hits the nail on the head. All those critics who were rapturously in support of Hoffman will be hard pressed to support something better even if they protest it's not. Unfortunately because this is a "see it now" kind of world and no one can wait to compare to works on similar subjects. Most reviewers have to get their say in before national release if at all possible. This generates a situation where critics "fall in love" with a role or story and champion it above other better works either to be rewarded or chastised in the end. They then must find some way to deflect the newer version even if they know it's better to they can make themselves not seem as boorish or naive as they are.

Those who found Capote dull and Hoffman's performance too (as Marshall describes it) bulky will no doubt be the voices of reason in the debate as they don't have anything to cover up about their dislike of the original film/characterization. Meanwhile, those who adored Capote and Hoffman will feel compelled to defend their past opinions and minimalize the quality and impact of Infamous.

[Sonic Youth]

Variety's pan may end up being the odd duck.


Infamous


Lee Marshall in Venice
01 September 2006 04:00
Screendaily

Dir/scr: Douglas McGrath. US 2006. 117mins.

To make another Truman Capote biopic may be regarded as a misfortune; to make another Truman Capote biopic about exactly the same period of the writer’s life looks like carelessness. But this classic industry no-no could play out, paradoxically, in favour of Douglas McGrath’s nuanced take on the US writer and doyen of Manhattan high society. Infamous is a fascinating film, dramatically more rewarding than Capote, and anchored by a mesmeric performance from British actor Toby Jones which more than measures up to last year’s Oscar-winning turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman. For the highbrow, urban audiences who will make up Infamous’ core audience, the deja-vu factor may prove to be an incentive: the game of compare and contrast adds extra spice to an already stimulating mix.

Infamous has been ready for a while – it started shooting a few months after Capote – but Warner Independent Pictures held back the US release until this autumn (Oct 13 in Los Angeles and New York, after a Horizons screening at Venice) to give the film some breathing space - and also, presumably, with a view to the award season. It would certainly be a first for an actor to pick up major prize acclaim for playing the same role as the previous year’s winner – but this scenario is by no means impossible, given the breadth and sensitivity of Jones’ take on Truman.

The story should be familiar by now. While searching for inspiration for a new book – his seventh – openly gay author and screenwriter Truman Capote sees a small news article about the vicious killing of a family of four in a Kansas farmstead. Leaving the coterie of New York society ladies that he calls his “swans” (among them Diana Vreeland, Babe Paley and Marella Agnelli, played respectively by Juliet Stevenson, Sigourney Weaver and Isabella Rossellini), Capote travels down to Hicksville with fellow author Nelle Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock), his lifelong friend and amanuensis.

Initially frustrated by the stonewalling of townspeople and police, Capote gradually charms away the resistance and begins to accumulate material for the book that would become In Cold Blood.

The core of what Capote thought of as a “non-fiction novel” is a portrait of the killers, a pair of drifters called Dick Hickock (Lee Pace) and Perry Smith (Daniel Craig in brooding, conflicted, pre-Bond mode). Hickock and Smith were eventually hanged for the crime, and Capote’s book went on to become an international bestseller.

The inbuilt moral intelligence of McGrath’s script and direction is established by a scene right at the beginning in which a sequin-robed Gwyneth Paltrow does a turn as a torch singer at a nightclub where Capote and Babe Paley have a table. In the midst of a suave rendition of Love For Sale she chokes up, seems to lose the thread of the song – and has the audience (on both sides of the screen) eating out of her hand before recovering and finishing in style. Is she faking for effect, or did she really break down?

The question is central to McGrath’s depiction of Truman as a man who is never not performing – even, perhaps, when he enters into the confidence of dour, introverted Perry Smith by offering up a stumbling confession about his own mother’s suicide.

The dilemma was raised in last year’s biopic, too – but there the audience were left in little doubt that Capote is manipulative through and through. Here there is a real sense of the writer as a sympathetic man forced to play the court jester in self-defence, and jolted out of his snobbery and ethical complacency by the good and bad of what he finds in Kansas. In Hollywood script-speak, McGrath’s Capote makes a longer journey.

The descent from a frothy comedy of manners (underscored by some almost parodically lightweight musical trills) into a dark moral melodrama (cue long, melancholic chords) is well-managed, although there are some problems of pacing in the overlong second half.

It’s also a shame that McGrath took the cliched route of the decontextualised TV-style interview to sidelight Capote’s character and motives, though there are some great quotes here – such as Gore Vidal’s description of Capote’s voice as “what a Brussels sprout would sound like if a Brussels sprout could talk”.

Jones, as Capote, is at once more freakish and more believable than Seymour Hoffman’s fine essay. There was something mannered about the bulky Hoffman’s take on the elfin Capote, whereas Jones – who has more of the build for the job – appears simply to inhabit the author’s skin, allowing us to watch him as Capote rather than as Jones doing Capote.

The other talent – including a neatly subdued Sandra Bullock – are mere sidekicks to this main act. The whirl of New York dinners, lunches and cocktails where Capote gossips with his swans, flattering and using them at the same time, is played up by glam settings, vintage high-fashion costumes and vibrant colours. It makes for a complete contrast to the drab monochromes, worn fabrics and monastic prison cells of the Kansas scenes, which nevertheless begin to impose a sort of moral authority through their sobriety, enhanced by Amelie cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel’s still placing shots of Midwestern farmscapes.

[Mister Tee]

It could be all the critics who went wild for Capote will take Rooney's stance, and those (like some of us here) who felt in the minority dissenting last year will echo Hollywood Reporter.

[VanHelsing]

Thanks a lot for the reviews Sonic Youth! Keep 'em comin'

[Sonic Youth]

Uh-oh. Another "Did they see the same movie?" case study. This review is as good as the other review was bad.

Infamous

By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter


It wasn't intended this way. Nevertheless, "Infamous" gives you the unique opportunity to see how two sets of filmmakers can take exactly the same story, make extremely tough though different choices in emphasis and tone and achieve brilliant movies. "Infamous" follows Truman Capote on his tortuous and ultimately soul-damaging six-year quest to write his masterpiece, "In Cold Blood," just as the Oscar-winning "Capote" did last year.

Which raises the question: Will "Infamous" be hurt by being released a year later? You would think people who enjoyed "Capote" and Philip Seymour Hoffman's amazing impersonation of that famous, self-aggrandizing writer would want to see the new film. Then again, there may be "Truman fatigue." "Capote" grossed $28.7 million at the domestic boxoffice, so you figure "Infamous" should at least make it past the $20 million mark.

Naturally, both films rely heavily on the central performance. English stage actor Toby Jones certainly looks like Truman Capote. Jones is small, and he makes this one of the keys to understanding this contradictory figure. His imitation of Capote's high-pitched voice and gloriously fey manner is equal to Hoffman's, but his emphasis is less on Tru the tortured author than on his lonely, yearning soul.

His Truman is a man on a lifelong, unrequited search for love. The great irony is that he comes closest to achieving this quest with four-time killer Perry Smith.

Here is where the two movies crucially diverge. "Infamous" spends much longer in the prison cell where the writer and his subject engage in a courtship that results in Perry opening up to Truman and allowing him to write his book. Daniel Craig plays the psychopath with a divided heart. As Truman says, "the tender and the terrible" dwell within him side by side. One side wars against the other, igniting rages that may well have fed the 1959 killing spree in Holcomb, Kansas.

"Infamous" covers the same time period as "Capote": from 1959 until the executions of Perry and his partner Dick Hickock (Lee Pace) in 1965. There are superficial similarities in how the movies juxtapose two dramatically different worlds -- plain-folks Kansas and forbidding prison cells in contrast to the martini-soaked, name-dropping, gossip-fixated Manhattan set where Truman's wit and literary fame made him the toast of many parties.

"Infamous" adds one more juicy ingredient. The movie is based on George Plimpton's oral biography, "Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career." So you get not only barbed "interviews" with the likes of author Gore Vidal (Michael Panes) but parties and boozy lunches with Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver), wife of CBS chairman William Paley; Neapolitan princess Marella Agnelli (Isabella Rossellini); socialite Slim Keith (Hope Davis); and Vogue editor Diana Vreeland (Juliet Stevenson). The movie even opens with Gwyneth Paltrow as Peggy Lee, singing and breaking down over "What Is This Thing Called Love?" That question haunts the rest of the movie.

According to "Infamous," Truman and Perry fall for each other. The author's seduction of the murderer for the sake of his book exposes each to a weird sort of alter ego: Both men had fathers who disappeared and disappointed and mothers who committed suicide. Both were greedy for attention. Truman earned his, but Perry had to kill four people.

Truman is accompanied to Kansas by childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock). She acts as guide and guardian for this strange little man, who initially is hapless and lost in the Midwest. But in this version, she gradually drifts to the sidelines while remaining a confidante and sounding board as the movie shifts from mannered comedy to gripping drama.

Jeff Daniels finds many layers in the role of Alvin Dewey, the Kansas police inspector who must be gradually and grudgingly won over to Truman's cause. Peter Bogdanovich is quite good as Bennett Cerf, the affable editor who ushers "In Cold Blood" into print.

Without the usual fuss and feathers of period pieces, cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel and designer Judy Becker make the past come wonderfully alive. Rachel Portman's melancholy score contributes to the film's sense of regret. For in "Infamous" Truman finds himself in love with a man who needs to die for him to achieve his goal. That kills him spiritually. It is a fact that Capote never finished another book.

[Sonic Youth]

Since you asked...

Infamous

By DAVID ROONEY
Variety

Held back for a year to distance it from "Capote," which deals with the same period in the writer's life, "Infamous" inevitably won't escape comparison with the earlier film. Regardless of the liberties taken, there was an integrity and character-complexity to the 2005 release that's missing from this glossier biopic. Writer-director Douglas McGrath's boldest stroke is to impose a more overtly gay interpretation on a central relationship in which the attraction was generally supposed to be unspoken. Whether or not audiences buy into that, "Infamous" doesn't measure up to its predecessor and seems unlikely to echo the attention it received.

The key point of both "Capote" and "Infamous" is that while the seminal true-crime tome "In Cold Blood" made Truman Capote --giving him a level of fame and success far beyond that of his previous books or his social standing among the Gotham glitterati -- it also broke him. It's a central failing of McGrath's film that this bitter irony is stated but unfelt. In fact, pic delivers greater poignancy in author Harper Lee's acknowledgement of her failure to follow the success of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Sandra Bullock's understated performance as Capote's friend Lee is a high point here -- wrapped in a cardigan and puffing on cigarettes, she creates a bracingly sturdy character of this plain-speaking, unfussy woman amid a cardboard gallery of flashy sophisticates.

In addition to its lighter tone, McGrath's attention to Capote's New York social circle is the chief difference between his film and director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman's more intimate portraiture. "Capote" focused more tightly on the writer's time in Kansas researching the killings of the Clutter family, and then on the protracted birth of his book, its development impacted by Capote's complex relationship with one of the murderers, Perry Smith.

To readers of the Capote biogs by George Plimpton and Gerald Clarke (respectively the basis for McGrath's and Miller's films) many of the anecdotes about the subject's insatiable taste for gossip and his fork-tongued wit will be familiar. The problem, however, is that McGrath has made an inherently artificial world even more artificial so his attempt to contextualize the Truman-Perry relationship feels empty. His reliance on the overused and intrusive docu-drama device of talking-head inserts (against a stylized Manhattan skyline) only amplifies this.

It's entertaining to watch Juliet Stevenson camping it up with her impersonation of Diana Vreeland (in production designer Judy Becker's meticulous recreation of the fashion maven's ornate apartment). But impersonation is exactly what it is. The parade of famous names playing famous names -- Sigourney Weaver as Babe Paley, Isabella Rossellini as Marella Agnelli, Peter Bogdanovich as Bennett Cerf, Hope Davis as Slim Keith -- is diverting but they're like glamorous wallpaper in a slick package. (The rich colors and sumptuous look of Bruno Delbonnel's lensing favor the city milieu over the Kansas plains.)

Only Gwyneth Paltrow is memorable in an arresting opening scene at El Morocco as a singer named Kitty Dean (clearly modeled on Peggy Lee). McGrath uses her fragility and Capote's rapt response to establish that sadness often lurks beneath the spotlight.

In the central role, British thesp Toby Jones is a good physical match for Capote, getting his flamboyant mannerisms and creepy, nasal voice down. But unlike Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning turn, there's no texture, no under-the-skin sense of the conflict between Capote's ambition for his book and his compassion for, and attraction to, Perry.

McGrath leans hard for comedy in the fish-out-of-water scenario, with Capote flouncing into town like nothing Kansas had ever seen before (locals initially keep calling him "lady") yet refusing to modify his behavior. Some scenes, like his Christmas visit to the home of detective Alvin Dewey (Jeff Daniels in one of the script's more solidly drawn roles), play like a gay sitcom.

In a production that assembles its star roster regardless of the actors' appropriateness for their roles (Weaver is especially awkward), it seems apt that Capote wins over the locals with celebrity name-dropping. But as the tone grows darker, the drama's balance is thrown off.

Miscasting of the drifters responsible for the murders doesn't help. His sinewy physique and craggy good looks make Daniel Craig more of a natural for Dick Hickock than for Smith. The latter was documented as short and physically unprepossessing, shared traits that made Capote feel an instant affinity. With his delicate features, Lee Pace, who makes a sexy, surly Hickock, might have worked better. Vulnerability isn't Craig's strongest suit.

He's also stymied by ham-handed writing of the physical and emotional attraction between the two men. When Perry says things to Truman like "We really connected, didn't we?", the dialogue is out of character and context. Worse is a heavy-breathing prison-cell clinch in which Perry's anger with Truman turns from threatening to borderline sexual.

McGrath isn't clear on whether this is meant to have happened or to be a fabrication from the embellishment-prone writer and gossip. Either way, none of it rings true, making the subsequent execution scene -- which should be shattering -- and its emotional fallout for Capote play out at an unaffecting distance.

[VanHelsing]

Oh Sonic Youth, why didn't you cache the page??!!

I've been searching high and low for Infamous reviews eversince I noticed that The Black Dahlia reviews were out already, but to no avail. Arghhhhhhh...

[Sonic Youth]

Variety has panned Infamous.

But you won't find the review on their site, because it was taken down. I don't know if it's because of a technical mishap, or if they accidentally broke a studio embargo and had to remove it. But it's gone. I just glanced at it, and my laptop didn't successfully cache the page. Sorry I didn't post it.

I think David Rooney reviewed it. If it will make a particular poster feel better, he did say Sandra Bullock was the best thing about the film. But if the rest of the reviews are as bad as this one was, it won't matter a bit in terms of Oscar consideration.

[VanHelsing]

The FULL trailer is accessible here: http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wip/us/med/infamous/infamous_tlr1_qt_700.mov

This is the super-resolution trailer. For hi-res, change the number from 700 to 500. For med-res, change to 300. And for lo-res, change to 100.

And after David Thomson, this is what Premiere magazine's Peter Herbst has to say about Infamous:

But there's another film, a small one, that might get lost in the shuffle and absolutely shouldn't - Infamous. The problem: It's a film about how Truman Capote reported and wrote In Cold Blood. Wait a minute, you protest, we saw that film last year, didn't we? Yes and no. Writer-director Doug McGrath's movie covers the same ground Capote did, but it feels utterly different, is highly entertaining, and deepens our understanding of Capote's motivations and methods during the period he wrote a book that still resonates today.

But, you might say, how could anyone top Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning turn as Capote? British actor Toby Jones may not top it, but he damn well equals it. What Infamous does for me is bring Capote's emotions, fears and passions to the fore. And Jones's work, along with stirring performances by Daniel Craig as Perry Smith and Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee, heightens our sense that Capote embarked on a job that took over him and ultimately destroyed him. It is superb dramatic filmmaking that shouldn't be missed just because you saw that other film. But, you ask (and this is the last question you get), there's no way that Jones could be nominated for an Oscar a year after another actor playing Truman Capote won, right? Maybe, but that would be on the Academy voters, because once you've seen Infamous, I think you'll agree that Jones (and Bullock and Craig) deserves the nod.

[OscarGuy]

Wow...that really IS a great impersonation. God, it's like he's channeling Truman. Well, I'm officially convinced that he should win an Academy Award. If Hoffman can win for a passable impression, this guy should win 2.

[VanHelsing]

For those who missed the ET clip, you can check it out HERE

Simply can't wait for this to come out! But I must add that it's so disheartening to know that AMPAS won't give any chance to this film just because of last year's Capote. Sigh...