Infamous is very cleverly cut together, particularly in showing how Truman "betrays" each of his friend's secrets to the others, and how he polishes his research findings until they're prose. It is also less credulous than Capote. Futterman and Miller believed Capote's claim to have nearly faultless recall of conversation; in Infamous we see that sometimes Nelle's is more accurate. The structuring is perhaps a little too clever; the mini-sequences all serve to make points. And, of course, these are a screenwriter's rhythms rather than a director's — you wouldn't go to Infamous for technical wizardry. But the legendary directors of The Departed and The Black Dahlia didn't provide memorable experiences on that front, either, and those movies were not nearly as well written.

With Infamous, McGrath puts himself right at the top of the list of American screenwriters who made the transition to directing, and, like Paul Mazursky and Michael Tolkin, he goes Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder one better by showing that censorship is not a necessary precondition for wit. In the final scenes, in which Capote is not only incapable of writing the unvarnished truth but unable to metabolize his feelings for Perry, McGrath accomplishes what Woody Allen never has — blending laugh-out-loud comedy with something bordering on tragedy. McGrath pulls it off here with the lightest touch, as if the entire range of human emotions were as easy to express as choosing the color of your pencil.

McGrath has enough self-consciousness to give his movie a definite shape, but it lacks the awards-seeking self-consciousness that channels the audience's responses, making them embarrassed to say they didn't care for it. The virtues of Infamous are probably what will keep it from getting the recognition it deserves, in the short run. In Capote, the irony was so pre-conceived that although Truman Capote came across as ambiguous, the experience of the movie was not. In Infamous, McGrath's writing is a bit set, his conception fully formed, but it preserves the unexpectedness of experience and the realizations experience brings. Infamous keeps alight what Amadeus (1984) snuffed — a tragicomedy about the perversities of artistic inspiration and achievement. It's as much fun as a fundamentally disturbing anecdote could possibly be.