Cold Blood

A second, slimmer Capote movie fails to improve on its predecessor.

By Robert Wilonsky

published: October 12, 2006

There is no way of sidestepping the issue, so why not jump right into it: Infamous, this year's retelling of how Truman Capote wound up in Kansas writing his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, never comes close to approaching the quiet, devastating brilliance of Capote, last year's retelling of how Truman Capote wound up in Kansas writing his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. It's good, especially during its first half, just not good enough. Had Infamous been the first version of the story to hit theaters, one might have regarded it as a very minor triumph — in no small part because of Toby Jones' performance, which makes up in warmth what it lacks in weight. Jones, who is 39 but has always looked all of 19, seems somehow closer to the Capote who survives on old talk-show appearances and in biographies — the gentle, elegant, protective, impish troublemaker, storyteller, and party presence who only seemed larger than life.

Jones has the lightness of a sprite; you can believe this guy might have worn pink lingerie while entertaining law-enforcement officers in his hotel room, as a Kansas Bureau of Investigation officer claims in George Plimpton's 1997 oral history (which writer Doug McGrath uses as his source). Hoffman would have looked like an elephant in a tutu.

The first half plays like a gossip column in which the boldfaced names have been brought to life by other boldfaced names, with Isabella Rossellini as Condé Nast editor and photographer Marella Angelli, Sigourney Weaver as media mogul missus Babe Paley, Juliet Stevenson as Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and Hope Davis as former Mrs. Howard Hawks Slim Keith. McGrath puts all of them in front of the camera as talking heads decorating a talk-show set, with a twinkling Manhattan in the background; he's aping Plimpton here, who offered, in lieu of narrative, a collection of unverified and likely hyperbolized anecdotes.

Joining their ranks is Nelle Harper Lee, played by Sandra Bullock with far more weariness than Catherine Keener brought to Capote. Would that Bullock, at last proving she's more estimable an actress than her choices would suggest, were allowed to devote an entire film to Lee's story. After all, we know Capote's by now.

But the second half just follows in Capote's footsteps, from the prison cell to the gallows to a career left in talk-show tatters. Sure, Infamous dares to suggest that Capote fucked killer Perry Smith (Daniel Craig in jet-black hair and clunky American accent) while the killer was in prison, but the change in tone is so jarring — from breezy sitcom to noir theatrics — that you're less jolted by Smith and Capote's scenes together than you are by the solemnity that crashes down and sucks the life out of the movie.