Arguably, the movie's high point is the moment when Perry demonstrates to a terrified Truman how the sensational title In Cold Blood makes him feel. (Perry's means are expressionistic, too.) The scenes between him and Truman seethe with a sexuality that is tinged with both brutal, instinctual violence and unprotected emotion. (We also get a sense of how the crime festered up from the tension between Perry and Dick.) Craig's Perry becomes the destructive-creative daemon of the movie, inspiring Capote by shattering him.
Overall, the movie makes a transition from light to dark. It flutters to life in Manhattan with Capote the social butterfly and then reveals something more parasitic about him in Kansas. But by pairing the opportunistic writer with the murderer who is straining to be understood, McGrath makes it so that the movie's bright and dark sides can't entirely be distinguished. When, in an early meeting, Perry gets up in Truman's face in defense of Marlon Brando, who hated Capote's caustic 1957 New Yorker profile of him, crazy-funny takes on a new aspect.
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.
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.