Ray Pride

The deadly pouf-spoof "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 potshots at his protagonist. McGrath's got a callous, jaded eye, a patrician disdain for the motley on display. This is a sustained sneer of a picture. (Call it "Bullets over Holcomb.")

The almost unspeakably homely Toby Jones, a 39-year-old British stage actor, playwright and monologist best remembered as the voice of "Dobby the House Elf" in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," his 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 mewling toad, a petulant bore who couldn't charm his own mother. This is the awful burlesque everyone feared "Capote" would be. It's like a homophobic "Saturday Night Live" sketch with a fair budget, presenting Capote as little more than a jaded, deluded, vain, foolish, shallow skit figure.

But that's just the cup of piss for some: Curmudgeonly critical elder, the 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: it is merely a bad movie.

McGrath takes a page from the form of his biographical source, George Plimpton's paragraphese, cut-and-paste style as a drama-sapping device, with "Reds"-like witnesses shot against a studio-setting skyline. (The actors include Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee, Gwyneth Paltrow as an emotional songbird, Sigourney Weaver and Hope Davis.) 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.) "Infamous" zips blithely forward as if performed by a road company where the theater manager is a secret sot.

McGrath's Capote is 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 put over such delicate perfume. He's better at the cheaply naughty reply to "Suck my cock, cocksucker," hurled by a Kansas convict: "I never snack."

As the killer Perry, blond Daniel Craig has blackened hair and dark contacts, and while his performance has the vigor you'd expect from this talented actor, he looks awful, like Tommy Lee Jones on a 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 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.

"Infamous" opens Friday. (2006-10-10)

Also by Ray Pride

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