The movie, however, is keyed to Jones's imaginative and physical energy, which thoroughly justify McGrath's approach, and the awkwardness can't muffle what the director and his star are on to here. That gets the movie only so far, however. There's still the way Capote gets details even the police don't know from Perry Smith (Daniel Craig), the scarier of the two killers, and the effect of Capote's methods and that information on how we feel about his artistic enterprise. McGrath, Jones, and Craig use this relationship to push the movie to another level.
Capote visits Perry on death row to gather what everyone will expect to find in the book — the events of that night. In other words, he descends into the netherworld for a scoop. At the same time, we believe that Capote is deeply moved and changed, perhaps destroyed, by the way Perry breaks through to the celebrity writer who swishes into the penitentiary to get a story.
Perry thinks of himself as an intellectual, a person who uses "big" words. (Capote's interest in him is first piqued when Dick Hickock, the other killer, tells him that Perry corrected Dick's grammar on the way to the Clutter's house.) More importantly, Perry has a supra-intellectual cunning; he knows when he's being lied to or exploited and he fiercely resents it. Craig's Perry is so deeply bitter and so innately muscular that his hostility has car-totaling impact. It takes a lot of force, though not much effort, for the feral Perry to pierce the deceptions (and self-deceptions) of Capote the high-flying, cosmopolitan journalist. In Capote, the effect the author had on people was always calculated because the makers wouldn't have been interested in a protagonist who wasn't, in the end, a hero: the writer of a fully achieved work. In Infamous, Capote clearly does not anticipate setting off the combustible Perry, and the result rattles some unexpected sense into the story.
We don't have to believe what we see literally. Perhaps Capote didn't have such unrestricted access to Perry, left alone with him in his cell with no guard. But even if this is fancy, it allows for scenes that dramatize what Perry and Truman come to feel about each other. This part of the movie works as expressionism without veering into the grotesque. Rather, what was grotesque in life comes closer to us until we can look at it without defensive reflexes. Perry may be raging but he's not senseless, repellent.
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.