Movie Review: Infamous Plays Joe Frazier to Capote's Muhammad Ali

There is little doubt that a character of Truman Capote’s magnitude provided enough material with his behavior and complexity to source two major motion pictures. Regardless, it is rare to see two movies come out within a year of one another telling similar stories in very different ways.

While Bennett Miller’s Capote, based on the biography by Gerald Clarke, delved into the calm waters at the surface of a very twisted soul, Douglas McGrath’s film Infamous explodes with noise and color. The screenplay (based on George Plimpton’s oral biography) effervesces and the characters tickle our noses. McGrath’s Capote is very much tied to, and a product of, his time, post-WWII pre end-of-Camelot.

Toby Jones as Truman is worth the price of admission. The embodiment of the word “pipsqueak,” Jones, in person and voice, more closely resembles the tottering Capote from the Dick Cavett show of yore. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Capote is taller, more masculine, more chiseled; Jones’s Capote is a doughy dwarf with a light interest in all things wicked.

While Jones’ portrayal does well to represent the grandeur of the dynamic Southern writer cum international socialite, it revels in the gossipy nature of the source material and relegates Capote to comedic parading. Capote as court jester becomes problematic as the story unfolds and the film reveals the utter lack of empathy and almost psychotic self-involvement of the writer. The film requires the audience to make too many leaps of faith regarding character development, dragging them along slowly through a sometimes cumbersome story weighted with contrived bits of filmmaking.

Infamous offers some light-hearted laughs but ultimately seems to miss the point evinced so well in the film’s first scene: below the surface there is a deep, troubled sadness. Sadly, that feeling gets lost in the flurry of noise and images throughout the rest of the film.

While Infamous may not be able to stand toe-to-toe with Capote, it is fascinating how virtually the same material in different hands can yield such dramatically different end results.

Infamous opens today in Austin.

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