Infamous

Infamous is more a study of Truman Capote and his relationship with the two men who murdered the Clutter family than of his writing of In Cold Blood. The film Capote focused more narrowly on the character of the author and his deepening involvement in the writing of the book. It argued that Capote exploited the two murderers, and others, so that he could produce the book—the notion was that he ruthlessly used other people’s lives, and deaths, to feather his own fame and success as an author. Both films suggest that the experience of writing In Cold Blood transformed Capote and damaged him as well. Capote suggested a gradual corruptive transformation in the writer, while Infamous offers another explanation.

Infamous followed Capote by a year, though both films were made around the same time. This is unusual, to have two films made more or less simultaneously, on the same subject, with many of the same characters. The two films complement one another rather than cove the same precise territory. Capote offers a sometimes cold and clinical analysis of the author, while Infamous is more humane and compassionate in its treatment. It also seems to be more speculative.

Infamous begins and ends with Capote writing down the title of his novel Answered Prayers, which he was beginning to write before he learned of the Clutter murders, and which he struggled to finish through the remainder of his life after the publication of In Cold Blood. The title carries a certain irony—irony that Capote’s chance reading of the short newspaper article on the murders led to his discovery of the subject for his greatest work, irony that he never finished the book called Answered Prayers—not finishing the book was the price he paid for In Cold Blood.

Infamous begins by showing us the social gadfly Truman Capote and his circle of women friends in New York—Diana Vreeland, Babe Paley, Slim Keith, and others. We see how he loves hearing the details of their private lives and how he gleefully violates their confidences by passing on their secrets to others. He feeds on their love affairs and disappointments. He charms and insinuates himself into their lives. He begs them for news about scandals. Later, as he gathers information about the Clutter murders, he shares his discoveries with these same women—in a sense, another kind of gossip.

This same kind of charm ultimately enables Capote to win his way into the graces of the Dewey family and other residents of the small Kansas town with his gossipy stories about Humphey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra, Jennifer Jones, John Huston, and other actors.

Infamous hypothesizes that Perry Smith and Capote developed a close relationship, that Smith fell in love with Capote, who may have Capote reciprocated, at least emotionally. The film thereby sidesteps (though not entirely) the idea that Capote exploited Smith and Hitchcock in the writing of In Cold Blood. Capote is torn in Infamous by his realization that his great work cannot be published until the murderers are executed and by the fact that when the book is published, it will be at the price of Perry’s death. Both films show Capote distancing himself from the murderers, refusing to answer their calls and letters, though Infamous implies this is because he felt helpless rather than because he had finished with them, or at least finished with Perry.

The film emphasizes how Capote and Perry Miller felt of abandoned by their parents, especially their fathers. This draws them together. Similarly, Harper Lee and Capote are connected by their efforts to finish novels—Lee has already finished To Kill a Mockingbird by the time the film begins, and she is struggling to write another novel—one she never finished—throughout the film. She talks about how writing takes a lot out of a writer, quoting Frank Sinatra on how every time Judy Garland sang a part of her died. She suggests that the same can be true for writers and that when Smith and Hickock were executed, Capote in a sense died with them. There is an implication in some abstract sense that Lee’s inability to finish her book, which at one point she tells Capote “won’t come together,” is connected to Capote’s failure to finish Answered Prayers, or at least in some sense explained by it. It is Lee in Infamous, as it was Lee in Capote, who tries to reason with Capote about the difference between fact and fiction and who confronts him with the suggestion that he might be toying with the lives of his subjects. In Capote it is this exploitation that leads to Capote’s corruption—his purported indifference to the lives of the people he writes about; in Infamous this blurring of truth and fiction leads Capote to involve himself in the life of one of the murderers to such an extent that he becomes, in a sense, his own victim.

Capote tells his editor that he wants to write an article about the town where the murders occurred so that he can examine the loss of trust in a small town—a topic that ties him to the small town of the South where he lived and grew up.

Infamous makes good use of Kansas as a setting. There are numerous shots of people standing in relief against the Kansas sky, especially at sunset, and the film therefore gives a sense of what it is that Capote is learning about the town and the people who live in it. It’s surprising that a man as openly gap and effeminate as Capote—the film suggests that he reveled in his effeminacy, laughing when townspeople mistake him for a “strange woman.”

There is a documentary frame to the film, where a series of interviews apparently conducted after Capote’s death with the various people he knew—Vreeland, Lee, Alvin Dewey, and others—talk about him and the experience of writing In Cold Blood.

The actor who plays Capote is excellent. He captures the exuberance of the young and wild Capote, though at times he seems more of an caricature than an accurate portrait. I preferred the acting of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, whose study of the writer was less mannered and more insightful, but the main character in Infamous was nonetheless excellent, as was Daniel Craige as Perry Smith.