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DVD
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Coming Out of the Capote Closet
Even though it failed to make a big splash, our critic is convinced that Infamous, new today on DVD, was the most important gay film of 2006.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at 5:10 PM
By Anderson Jones
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Warner Home Video
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Worth renting just for her performance
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Infamous, new today on DVD, sets the scene with a quick tour of Capote's Manhattan world: the bars, the drinks, the fabulous, the rich, the nightclubs and the nightingales. (The title credits also contain a warning: I famous hovers onscreen before the letter “N” fades in. A hint, perhaps, that in the desperation to become famous, you just may end up infamous.)
Kitty Dean (Gwyneth Paltrow) delights the chic uptown audience with her rendition of a jazzy "This Thing Called Love." She begins light and airy, then, just before her final swing, she pauses and we watch her face as her heart crumbles and falls back into place right before our eyes. Is it the weight of a crushing love or the pain of love lost? Is it a smack? Never mind. It's an astonishing moment, and Truman Capote (Toby Jones) and girlfriend Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver), in the front row but not paying attention to
anything beyond themselves, have tears in their eyes.
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Warner Home Video
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Toby Jones as Capote
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You, however, must pay attention for a few key reasons. First, they gave the Oscar to Judi Dench for her eight-minute turn in Shakespeare in Love. Gywneth, who also starred in that movie, could do it in five. This moment is also a perfect example of Douglas McGrath's economic storytelling. He's encapsulated the dizzying higs and lows of Truman's love story with death row killer Perry Smith (Daniel Craig) with one song. It takes almost as much time to know that British actor Toby Jones has mastered Capote; had Philip Seymour Hoffman not trodden the same ground in 2005, it’s very possible that Jones would currently be in the running for Best Actor.
McGrath begins to tell his story with faux-documentary elements in the style of George Plimpton's book, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. He cuts between scenes of Truman's life and commentary from those who knew him (all played by contemporary actors (like Hope Davis, Isabella Rossellini and Sandra Bullock).
If it feels familiar, there's a reason. The screenplays for Capote (first-timer Dan Futterman) and Infamous were once jockeying for position in Hollywood, both intending to tell the story of Truman Capote while researching and writing the paradigm-altering novel, In Cold Blood. Although both were greenlit at almost the same time, Capote got the name-brand actor and went into immediate production.
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Warner Home Video
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An unrecognizable Daniel Craig
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McGrath's studio waited to stay out of the fray and found its own Truman in the
remarkable Jones, who makes a complex, difficult part almost warm and fuzzy. It's clear, in this film, why Truman was liked – no, adored - and also why a lonely, lost man in a prison cell would fall for him socompletely. We see it in Jones: Capote lived his life. In a curious way, it illustrates the wisdom of investing in a script instead of one or another actor.
Because of his long indie pedigree (and star status), Hoffman was the star of Capote and the sun around which his costars orbited. In Infamous, Jones leads a chorus of talent, each eager to devour every nuance of their fantastically layered and nuanced script. They have to, as some of them only get a few minutes.
Infamous is an ensemble piece, Capote a star vehicle. And I suppose Jones, astonishingly, has an edge in his portrayal of Truman. We don't know him, so it's much easier for an audience to see Capote in their mind's eye when they don't recognize the actor playing that person. If you were a fan of Hoffman's Capote, you were a fan of the work. His film seemed so actory.
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Warner Home Video
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Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee
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Jones' portrayal seems so much more effortless and - what's the word Harper Lee loved to use when describing her friend? – “effervescent.” That's hardly the word you'd use to describe the experience of watching Capote (itself based on the less frothy Capote), a leaden excursion by comparison. In fact, you can describe the difference between the two in the same way that InCold Blood was a departure from Capote's other, cinematic works (Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Grass Harp).
You can't say Capote, the film, was kind. And McGrath's faux-documentary framing would be far less effective in the hands of lesser actors. In order for the device to work, we must believe that Juliet Stevenson is Diana Vreeland. And we do. (Where's
the Diana Vreeland biopic?) We'll never know, but I'm willing to imagine that the great work in Capote certainly influenced the brilliant turns here.
Like any good biopic master, McGrath can find and tease the most riveting threads out of a person's life and then use them to tell a compelling, unexpected story. It's the
sort of thing Capote wanted to do with his "reportage," as he called it, for In Cold Blood. The idea was to use the true crime novel as the model and make it, well, true; use the facts and massage them into a stirring, readable news story.
McGrath recognized that Capote's biggest achievement wasn't necessarily writing In Cold Blood; it was getting the population of a tiny Kansas town on his side. He flips Wizard of Oz on its head and sends two aliens from the Big Apple to Kansas. And Truman and Harper are definitely strangers.
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Richard Lewis/WireImage.com
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Filmmaker Doug McGrath
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In Kansas, Truman's really strange. McGrath answers the question: How did a tiny man with a shrill, affected, effeminate voice draped in fur-lined coats and floor-sweeping scarves get a small town or, more incredibly, a couple of murderers to tell him their stories? In 1959? Before Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?
In both movies, the process begins with the town DA, Alvin Dewey (Jeff Daniels). In Infamous, it's also a wickedly funny process. By coincidence, Mrs. Dewey bumps into Capote, who's craving top-shelf cheese at the local grocery store and she finds him archly considering a cooler full of Velveeta on Christmas Eve. She invites Capote and Lee over for Christmas dinner and, naturally, Capote's a sensation. He thrills dinner guests with tales of Marilyn Monroe, Lauren (Betty) Bacall and director John Huston and of arm wrestling Humphrey Bogart. And the walls of Jericho come down.
By the time Capote meets Perry Smith (Daniel Craig) and Dick Hickock (Lee Pace), who stand accused of the Clutter murders, it's clear he's not a journalist. He refers to sources as "characters." He doesn't use a tape recorder. He doesn't take notes. He relies on his memory.
And when that fails him or isn't adequate, he uses his imagination. Lee warns him about this, but he's soon done with The New Yorker and thinking about a novel. A new kind of novel. Infamous becomes a movie that evokes Brokeback Mountain when Truman decides that to get Perry to open up he has to share his own shame.
It's as pure and lovely a seduction scene of Craig by Jones as cinema does. The intense, near-rape scene intensifies their bond. Gays will be rewinding their kiss on DVD for ages. Interestingly enough, those scenes are sorta, kinda in Capote, too. It just took a straight writer-director to fully (honestly) embrace the sexuality of these two
instead of hiding from it.
In Capote, you're pretty sure Hoffman liked Clifton Collins, Jr. Maybe. Why? Because gay men who have come so far in the world are still afraid to be gay in Hollywood. The acknowledgement of Capote's homosexuality and not just his
eccentricity is precisely what's missing from Capote. That's what makes Infamous the most significant gay movie of last year.
| For Craig, pre-Bond, Infamous is a daring and risky showcase of a developing talent. He plays not only a raging homosexual, but a gay, initially unlikable, cold-blood killer. His timing is sublime. But tell me how can any hulking, macho guy resist such a sympathetic role? Craig's Perry, the ne plus ultra of bad boys, leaks
charisma and has depth and drama to spare.
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In the final act, McGrath loses the plot a bit. Honestly, how would you feel if the love of your life - the love of several lifetimes - was being hanged right before your eyes? We get it. But the execution scenes are excruciating and overwrought. We also know how Capote's story ends. Many folks, who are still alive today, watched his meltdown on any number of late-'70s talk shows. Besides, Perry sends a cassette tape (remember those?) of him singing his father's favorite song, "Goldmine in the Sky," and it could have been lovely to bookend Paltrow's performance with Craig's dreamy voice.
Sigh. Capote didn't die a slow death consuming more and more pills and alcohol. He died of a broken heart. But it's not an unrequited love story. We know that Capote wrote what he heard in his head and not necessarily with his ears. And we also know that writing is hard.
| I'm a journalist who tries to write to deadline and sometimes can't do that. My best friend's a poet and writes on his lunch break, at night, during the day, on weekends and so on. I don't know which is more honorable, but I know what's harder.
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In Cold Blood stands as a monument of what he felt in his heart - his love for Smith and to what Smith believed was his greatest work of art at the Clutter house. It's pathological, but finally, people noticed and respected him. But not until he killed three people in cold blood.
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