London,

Infamous

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Cert: 15

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Dir: Douglas McGrath. Cast: Toby Jones, Daniel Craig, Sandra Bullock

 

Description: Toby Jones leads a Truman Capote pic that unfortunately has the identically themed but Oscar-winning Capote to compare with. A pity, as it's a perfectly good biopic.

Country: US. 2006. 118mins

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Capote returns to the screen a changed man

 

Toby Jones as Truman Capote and Daniel Craig as Perry Smith

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If it seems absurd that we are being asked to see yet another film about Truman Capote and his struggles to write In Cold Blood, his book about the brutal murderers of a Kansas farming family, at least Douglas McGrath's warmer, more emotional film is quite different in style and content from last year's Capote.

That film secured Philip Seymour Hoffman his Oscar for Best Actor and it's bad luck for British actor Toby Jones, who is almost his equal, that lightning is unlikely to strike twice. Jones makes the openly gay Capote, with his legion of women "swans" at his side, into a highsociety court jester whose hitherto confidant emotional life is destroyed by his obsession with Daniel Craig's Perry Smith.

We see more clearly why he was unable to write anything else half as good as In Cold Blood and why his life, after Perry's hanging, was never the same again. If this is a very fine performance, Craig's as Perry is as powerful as anything he has done on the screen, including Bond, allowing for a bitterness in the man that constantly fights with his burgeoning and possibly homosexual affection for the only friend he has.

This pair dominate the film, based on George Plimpton's book on Capote and his friends, though there is a cast of stars in cameo roles that includes Sandra Bullock as writer and confidante Nelle Harper Lee, Jeff Daniels as the Kansas prosecutor, Gywneth Paltrow as a singer surely based on Peggy Lee, Isabella Rossellini, Sigourney Weaver and Juliet Stevenson.

McGrath's version of the story is undoubtedly fictionalised. I can't believe, for instance, in the mouth-to-mouth kiss Capote and Perry indulge in at one point. And the gay element is stretched almost to breaking point. But this is a quietly fascinating film which shows a less selfish and more vulnerable side to Capote as it sets out to prove that the Manhattan socialite whose idea of a care package was Beluga caviar eventually slunk back into high society a totally changed man.

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