Flamboyant

Blind ambition: Toby Jones stars as Truman Capote in the Douglas McGrath film Infamous. (Deana Newcomb/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)

The producers of Infamous must wake up at night hallucinating elephants. Theirs is a late-to-the-party retelling of Truman Capote’s quest to write In Cold Blood, also the subject of last year’s lauded Capote, the aforementioned pachyderm in the room. Let’s slay that elephant now and move on: Infamous is a bubblier, rainbow-striped version — it made me wonder if Capote had been shot in black and white, but in fact, it only felt like it was — that ultimately lacks the import of the first, but also, thankfully, the pretentiousness.

This Capote is played by British actor Toby Jones, a homunculus whose flowing scarves weigh more than he does. Jones’s pocket size means he bears a more accurate physical resemblance to Capote than Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose girth was the one unbelievable thing about that performance. The dandy author lives in velvet-draped rooms in Manhattan, staring daily at the blank page, but his artistic tortures remain private, and brief. Most of the time he’s on the cocktail circuit or learning the twist with the neglected society wives who adore him. Director Douglas McGrath, working from George Plimpton’s oral biography, turns these lunching ladies into a whip-smart Greek chorus, with Juliet Stevenson going big as Diana Vreeland and Sigourney Weaver playing a wonderfully shrill Babe Paley. The one-liners stack teeteringly high — “If a brussel sprout had a voice, it would sound like Truman” — and the first part of the movie has a yummy effervescence tinged with a tiny hint of foreboding (Gwyneth Paltrow cameos as a glamourous singer on the edge of disintegration). The centre, presumably, cannot hold.

For substance, Capote turns to childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee, played with convincing sobriety by Sandra Bullock, making up for past atrocities. The new author of To Kill a Mockingbird is struggling with her own stature as a writer, but her quiet angst is skimmed over by Capote. When he’s around, it’s always the Truman show (his life is a testament to Fran Lebowitz’s statement that “The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting”). Yet Capote is kind and even caring, in his own distracted way, and he deserves as fine a friend as Lee. She accompanies him to Holcomb, Kansas, to research the murders of the Clutter family, the notorious 1959 random serial killings that made America lock its doors.

Capote (Jones) and New York City socialite Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver) catch up at the El Morocco night club. (Deana Newcomb/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)

Once in the flatlands, the champagne bubble pops, and the film darkens into a noir-ish detective story with Capote playing investigator. Locals keep referring to the writer in the ankle-length rabbit-fur coat as “ma’am,” but Capote is never a snob. He is as thrilled by his celebrity name-dropping as his new small-town friends are. In fact, he knows a thing or two about provincial living, having endured a terrible childhood in Louisiana.

These are the kinds of secrets he begins to trade with Perry Smith (Daniel Craig), the more literate of the two killers. Inside his prison cell, Perry studies the dictionary, a fact that instantly endears him to Capote. The humanity simmering within the criminal is perplexing to the man, but it makes good copy for the journalist. Writers write for many reasons, but narcissism is always one of them, and the selfishness of his work is hard to reconcile with the gentle, softer Capote of Infamous. But McGrath delivers a more emotional, less mercenary creature on purpose. Not only is Capote desperate to ply secrets from the reticent, brooding Perry — the feral Craig has a face both beautiful and beat up — he is also falling in love with a man he comes to see as a struggling fellow artist (Perry had been a musician and prolific letter writer). A sexual relationship under prison conditions seems improbable, but an attraction between two men damaged by the past and frustrated in the present isn’t. People have kissed — and more — for less.

Over six long years, Capote awaits the killers’ executions so he can have a tidy conclusion to his masterpiece. In McGrath’s vision, the horror of this gruesome death-watch isn’t only the artist’s tragic flaw, but a lover’s betrayal, too. If the film had delved deeper into Capote’s sexual desires, and their intrinsic link to his creative ones, perhaps the writer’s ruin — he never completed another book — would have felt more earned than it does. Instead, while Infamous avoids the self-importance that bogged down the first Capote film, it also sputters and dies in the final third, failing to regain its early vibrancy. The problem is not merely that the tone shifts from cocktail party to funeral; on the contrary, that contrast is the film’s strength. But McGrath never quite returns us to an equivalent engagement. If this world we were so seduced by contributed to Truman Capote’s end, then we need to see the ugliness of the party in the same fullness that had us reveling in its joy.

Infamous opens across Canada on Oct. 13.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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