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It's star-studded, flashy but not necessary an improvement.
Released a year after Capote, Infamous follows the same impulse of spinning a story around American novelist Truman Capote’s struggle to finish his nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood.
Toby Jones puts on the glasses and fey mannerisms as Capote, a social butterfly with an unflappable wit and an unfailing mobility in and out of New York’s chattering classes.
The creator of such lightweight novels as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, he’s looking for the big break — and which would later break him — in the form of a multiple-homicide in Kansas.
Instead of just churning out an article for The New Yorker, as he had originally conceived it, Capote decides to apply a novelist’s tricks of the trade to telling the story.
Accompanied by his long-time friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mocking Bird, Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock), Capote travels to Kansas to dig up the gossip and facts.
Ingratiating himself with the town folks by name-dropping the Hollywood stars he’s rubbed shoulders with, he soon becomes attracted to one of the two killers caught, Perry Smith (Daniel Craig). The rest of the film mostly involves Capote visiting Smith in jail and trying to coax him into telling his side of the story.
Unlike Capote, which won Philip Seymour Hoffman the Oscar for Best Actor and brought us closer to the man, Infamous merely skims the surface.
Jones, while managing a fine impersonation of Capote, sometimes crosses the line into caricature.
The stars who turn in cameos — Sigourney Weaver, Isabella Rosselini and Gwyneth Paltrow — also do nothing to lend weight to a glossy production.
And while director Douglas McGrath tries to mimic the style of In Cold Blood by inserting mockumentary interviews with friends of Capote, the effect is perfunctory rather than integral to the storytelling.
Still, Infamous is entertaining enough — if you forget the shadow cast by its more illustrious predecessor. - TODAY/fa
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