HAROLD NYE (KBI agent): Al Dewey invited me to come up and meet this gentleman who'd come to town to write a book. So the four of us, KBI agents, went up to his room that evening after we had dinner. And here he is in kind of a new pink negligee, silk with lace, and he's strutting across the floor with his hands on his hips telling us all about how he's going to write this book….HAROLD NYE: … Accuracy was not his point…. What I did in Las Vegas, the people I talked to out there, it just was not written truthfully. It was probably an insignificant thing, except I was under the impression that the book was going to be factual, and it was not; it was a fiction book.
—George Plimpton, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career (1997)
Infamous, the movie that writer-director Douglas McGrath worked up from Plimpton's book, has as good an opening as any movie that comes to mind. (It's at least the best since Richard Rush's The Stunt Man [1980].) Truman Capote (Toby Jones) sits gossiping in a nightclub with Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver), one of his "swans," i.e., the wedge of superrich Manhattan socialites who petted and confided in him, while the (fictional) chanteuse Kitty Dean (Gwyneth Paltrow) sings a fast, light-voiced version of Cole Porter's "What Is This Thing Called Love?"
Suddenly the singer falters, the band slows to a stop, and the startled room falls silent. Kitty struggles to voice the words, which seem to have so much meaning for her she can't help turning public space into uncomfortably confessional private space. The audience, imagining they're witnessing a breakdown, watch rapt as she stops singing altogether. After an extended pause, Kitty starts snapping her fingers to give the band the beat, and they take up again, with Kitty smiling knowingly because her coup de théâtre has worked on the most jaded crowd, a crowd that wasn't even listening to her until she fooled them.
This isn't only a clever bit in itself (one that puts Paltrow's combination of fragility and poise to better use than any other movie so far). It also puts you in the most receptive mood possible for what follows, a story in which it's hard for the characters to distinguish between the aestheticizing of emotion and the faking of it. It's not a binary distinction, between, say, emotion and sensation, by which we may readily sort out the "genuine" art from the ersatz. The two may always come promiscuously entangled with each other, in both art and life. The topic arises inevitably when thinking about the non-believer Verdi's spectacular, overwhelming Messa da requiem, for instance, and McGrath astutely uses it as the foil against which Infamous is set.
Infamous covers the composition of Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood, which is about the murder of the Clutter family in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959 and the two men who committed it. That is, it covers the same period of the author's life as Bennett Miller's Capote (2005), but Infamous is not only the more entertaining movie, it's the more sophisticated, and the more emotional, as well. It's a brilliantly variegated work, and the best American movie I've seen so far this year.
Dan Futterman's script for Capote took an ingenious, icily ironic view of its main character. It did not, however, have a dramatic shape to match. It was a simple heroic romance: In Cold Blood was the masterpiece Capote was born to write and every experience was part of the ordeal of achieving that quest. Capote showed a fearless wit about its writer protagonist, but it didn't dare to be funny, probably because the moviemakers' view of In Cold Blood was so reverential it tended to flatten everything, even their best ideas. Capote had a self-seriousness that was indistinguishable from dullness, though it probably accounted for the praise the movie received. It was an "intelligent" and "literate" movie about a flamer who became fascinated with a psycho.
Article comments
1 - Michael J. West
Well! Of all of the many reviews I've read that compared Capote to Infamous--and of course the comparison is inevitable--that makes...one, that thought Capote was the lesser.