Sandra Bullock as Capote's lifelong childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee, turns in her first real grownup role – played with gravitas and an excellent Southern accent - and Daniel Craig's Perry Smith is excellently menacing and desperate for attention. Craig plays gritty low-class criminals with expertise, leaving this reviewer to wonder how he could possibly play an urbane and witty James Bond. It will be interesting to see if Craig can rise to play 007, with his apparently small stature - he is only slightly taller than the diminutive Jones - blond features, and petty criminal looks.
Playing Truman Capote is English stage actor Toby Jones who does a marvelous job and is as deserving of an Oscar as was Philip Seymour Hoffman for his role in 2005's Truman film, Capote. Jones has had minor supporting roles in various films (Mrs Henderson Presents, Finding Neverland, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), but is mostly unknown to American audiences and his Capote will surprise you as it is so close to the real Truman. Bullock adds a dose of reality to Jones' Capote as his lifelong friend, companion, liaison, assistant, and author (To Kill a Mocking Bird, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961).
Capote and Infamous will, no doubt, long be compared to each other. It's quite interesting to see two films about the same person focusing on the same period of time, but each with different focuses. Both certainly depend on the lead performances and Jones is particularly appropriate as he is as small a man as was Capote. He adopts the same fey Capote attitude and affected speech patterns, but in this Capote we also see a man yearning for love, even though he is shown here as having a lifelong significant other.
The two films are different in a significant aspect. Infamous shows us how Capote becomes engrossed with one of the killers of the Clutter family, Perry Smith, during many intimate moments Truman spent in Smith's cell. Each begins to reveal facts about themselves to the other and they find that they have much in common, fathers who disappeared from their lives, mothers who were depressed and committed suicide, and both were clearly greedy for any attention they could get. In this film their commonalities connect the two and Truman was greatly affected by Smith's death.
Article comments
1 - Rebecca Wright
Wasn't the killers name Perry Smith? Prery King is the actor from shows like "Riptide."