Bennett Miller's "Capote" (2005) and Douglas McGrath's "Infamous" (2006) both deal with Truman Capote's work on "In Cold Blood", his most famous book.
“Capote” was one of the cinematic highlights of a year that had seen an astonishing number of excellent and surprising films. The film earned one Oscar for Best Leading Actor and another 5 Oscar nominations in the categories Best Director, Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It does not look like “Infamous” will ever come close to this level of critical acclaim.
Yet it would be unfair to say that “Infamous” is a negligible film, even if it does not reach the level of dramatic depth and superb acting that we experienced in “Capote”. Arguably, Toby Jones managed better than Philip Seymour Hoffman to convey the impishness and freakishness of the later Capote due to both Jones’s unusual physical shortness and his highly successful high-pitched voice performance. In addition, while Hoffman’s dress and behaviour may be somewhat out of place in a setting like 1950s rural Kansas, Toby Jones’s fashion and demeanor come across as truly eccentric. “Infamous” also is somewhat funnier, lighter than “Capote”, making it to some extent more entertaining.
With regard to the logic of the real-life drama covered by the two films, however, “Capote” is more mature and developed. For example, “Infamous” does not manage to make it plausible how Capote could succeed to earn the trust of a rural Kansas community coping with a gruesome murder and to open up people’s hearts. Seymour Hoffman presents a Capote who, in all his decadence and complexity of character, does possess a considerable amount of sensitivity toward the emotional pain of others which, in turn, he can use to his advantage.
Toby Jones’s Capote, by contrast, appears to take in the community merely by telling anecdotes about his encounters with various famous movie stars and directors. It is questionable whether this method would have sufficed to make people so different from him in style and values open up to him to talk about the most painful things that ever happened to their community.
Neither of the two depictions of Capote during his time in Kansas perhaps does full justice to Capote’s appearance and style at the time as we know it from photographs. He was, at the time, still a young man, of almost delicate stature, wearing fashionable, Oxford style clothes but still lacking the eccentricity of the later Capote that “Infamous” suggests. In Richard Avedon's series of photographs taken of Capote together with killer Perry Smith he appears to be wearing a suit with white shirt and bow-tie, looking very young. These pics also make us better understand the erotic attraction that apparently existed between Smith and Capote.
“Infamous” brings this relationship more into the forefront than “Capote”. However, both films probably have to be taken with a grain of salt as true depictions of reality. None of them manages to remove the real Capote’s enigma, and perhaps this is a good thing.
Clifton Collins (“Capote”) and Daniel Craig (“Infamous”) both give nice though in neither case fully believable performances of Perry Smith’s character. Craig projects too much self-confidence while Collins stresses Smith’s vulnerable, artistic, and sensitive side. For all we know, Smith was half-educated, artistically gifted, easily exploited, vulnerable, but also prone to sporadic outbreaks of physical aggression, lacking self-confidence, and traumatized by memories of his childhood. Perhaps the best and most believable performance of this mix is to be credited to Robert Blake in the 1967 b/w film adaptation of “In Cold Blood”.
