THE DEADLY INFAMOUS, SPITEFUL AND SUPERIOR, would be second best standing out in a field by itself. What a rotten, rotten movie, with the even more rotten fortune to follow the austere fictionalization of Truman Capote’s research of “In Cold Blood” that was Bennett Miller, Dan Futterman and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Capote. Infamous reeks of curdled cosmopolitanism, with the co-writer of Bullets over Broadway taking a succession of eccentric potshots at his protagonist. McGrath’s got a callous, jaded eye for the complicated writer and a patrician disdain for the motley on parade in his fourth feature. (Call it “Bullets over Holcomb.”)
The almost unspeakably homely Toby Jones, a 39-year-old British stage actor, playwright and monologist with a crumpled resemblance to Capote, best remembered as the voice of “Dobby the House Elf” in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, has hooded eyes like an ancient pug with a nasal whine instead of a bronchial wheeze, follows Hoffman at a great distance, caricaturing Capote as a petulant bore who couldn’t charm his own mother. This is the awful burlesque everyone feared Capote would be. It’s like a clumsily homophobic “Saturday Night Live” sketch, presenting Capote as little more than a shallow, delusional skit figure.
But that’s just the cup of piss for some: Curmudgeonly critical elder, expatriate Englishman David Thomson, is already on record purporting greatness for this disaster: “In Capote, the achievement… is to show that Capote was a shit, a devious glory-seeker and a fine writer who got his own way all the time. That film says he was ruined by his success, but… Hoffman’s Capote is too tough and too self-centered to be brought down by his own moral failure… [T]his is a staggering advance in which Capote the social shit and Truman the crushed soul are equally apparent… Understand in advance that the leading arbiters of culture will tell you it’s the same thing warmed up, a story you know, a curiosity even. It’s none of those. We do not write off this year’s “Hamlet” because we enjoyed last year’s.” I will tell you this: we write off this year’s Capote because it is merely a bad movie.

McGrath uses Reds-like “witnesses” shot against a studio-setting skyline, taking a page from the form of his biographical source, a paragraphese, cut-and-paste bio by George Plimpton. It’s a drama-sapping device. Among the actors are Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee, Gwyneth Paltrow as an emotional songbird, Sigourney Weaver and Hope Davis. (The half-star is for Juliet Stevenson’s vivacious turn as Vogue editrix Diana Vreeland, an enameled Jill-in-the-box, a paragon of chinosieries, practical observation and giddy nonsense that resembles the figure also seen in Mary Louise Wilson’s ”Full Gallop,” a brilliant 2003 one-woman show channeling the daft diva.)
Spookily, McGrath’s screenplay moves almost in lockstep with Futterman’s, hitting many of the same incidents, figures and notes. (The two films were produced almost simultaneously.) But compared to the first to be released, Infamous clumps blithely forward as if performed by a road company where the theater manager is a secret sot.
McGrath’s Capote is, as Thomson admired, a little shit in saddle shoes, arriving on the Kansas prairie with steamer trunks of frou-frou and unlikely garlandry. Telling the same anecdotes as told in Capote, Truman’s name-clattering gossip is the currency that gets confidences about the Clutters from the “foxy” sheriff. The dialogue veers from elevation to degradation, and the actors throw the alleged bon mots away: “It was deep calling to deep”; “This world isn’t kind to little things”; “What is your stupid fucking point?”; and the sweet-turned-precious “When that wind comes, it picks you up, light as a leaf, and takes you where it wants to go. You are in control until you’re not.” Mr. Jones does not have the chops to find the notes in those perfumed lines. He’s better at the twirpily naughty reply to “Suck my cock, cocksucker,” hurled by a Kansas convict: “I never snack.”
As the killer Perry, blonde Daniel Craig has dark contact and blackened hair, and while his performance has the vigor you’d expect from this talented actor, he looks off-puttingly strange, like Tommy Lee Jones on an exceptionally bad day. (Recall instead his smart-dumb performance as Francis bacon’s bit of rough in Love is the Devil.) The ostensible emotional bond between the two men is made gravely explicit. Still, it is mildly amusing to hear Craig’s Perry sneer at the vulgarity of “Holly-Go-Fucking-Lightly.” McGrath embroiders elsewhere, substituting the fiction of publisher Bennett Cerf accompanying Capote to the execution for Miller’s fiction of New Yorker editor William Shawn coming along to witness the deaths. Bogdanovich’s wooden, amateur performance as Cerf is perhaps the lowest, unless you fail to turn a blind eye to the death row fuck-without-touching between Capote and killer Smith. [Ray Pride]

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