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Two recent features about Truman Capote, coincidentally made around the same time, concentrate on Capote’s work on his true-crime best seller In Cold Blood, about the slaying of a family in rural Kansas. Both suggest that Capote’s life and career were destroyed by the emotional strain of researching and writing that book, yet they’re fascinatingly different in what they try to do and in how they depict their subject. Capote–which professes to be based on Gerald Clarke’s standard biography of the same title–came out a year ago and won its lead actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman, an Oscar. Infamous–which claims to be based on George Plimpton’s Truman Capote, a collection of gossipy sound-bites assembled in the same manner as his “oral histories” about Edie Sedgwick and Robert F. Kennedy–was released a year after it was completed to avoid comparisons with Capote. Now that it’s out, comparisons are in order–and not all of them are to Capote’s advantage. For starters, Hoffman is more multilayered than Toby Jones as Capote, but Daniel Craig is more commanding than Clifton Collins Jr. as Perry Smith, one of the two killers in In Cold Blood.
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Capote superficially resembles Clarke’s book by proceeding as if it were a biography. Infamous superficially resembles Plimpton’s by including a lot of contradictory dish about Capote, addressed to the camera by actors playing friends and acquaintances, as if at a commemorative cocktail party: Peter Bogdanovich does a funny impersonation of Bennett Cerf, and there’s Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee, Sigourney Weaver as Babe Paley, Juliet Stevenson as Diana Vreeland, Hope Davis as Slim Keith, Jeff Daniels as Alvin Dewey (the Kansas agent in charge of the murder investigation), and other, lesser-known actors as Capote’s live-in lover Jack Dunphy and archenemy Gore Vidal. In the pointless opening sequence, set in a nightclub, Gwyneth Paltrow does an unconvincing Peggy Lee imitation.
This brief monologue by Smith was one of the two in the book that had the strongest impact on me when I first read it serialized in the New Yorker. The other was Smith’s apology for the murders just before he was executed: “I think it’s a helluva thing to take a life in this manner. I don’t believe in capital punishment, morally or legally. Maybe I had something to contribute, something–” Then, after a pause: “It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize.”
