Infamous

last updated 8 January 2015

'œThey gave the Oscar to the wrong Truman Capote,' said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. Philip Seymour Hoffman won Best Actor playing the acid-tongued author in last year's Capote. But Toby Jones here makes the role his own, and Hoffman's performance seems but a cheap impersonation by comparison. Writer-director Douglas McGrath certainly doesn't shy away from head-to-head comparisons with Capote, said Stephen Hunter in The Washington Post. Both films tell precisely the same story about Capote's research of a Kansas family's murder for his book In Cold Blood. Both have starry casts, clever dialogue, and pretensions to high art. 'œIf you run the two films off against each other, you get a plus-minus tote board barely in favor of Capote.' But Infamous is lighter and funnier, like Capote himself. That's a virtue and a flaw, said Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sigourney Weaver and Isabella Rossellini have fun playing famous socialites. But superficiality turns to camp when the film asks us to believe that Capote's ambiguous relationship with Daniel Craig's coldblooded killer was a full-fledged love affair. Sandra Bullock, by contrast, is astonishingly believable as Harper Lee, Capote's best friend and the film's moral center. Hers is 'œthe performance to take from the movie.'

Rating: R