Infamous

Here’s a chance to compare two very different takes on the same material. Last year’s Capote brought home the Oscar for Philip Seymour Hoffman, but this portrayal by Toby Jones (better known as the voice of Dobby from the Harry Potter films) of the brilliant and egotistical author, who was smaller than average but larger than life, manages to be more accurate and even more compelling. McGrath adapts his version of the writing of Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, from the book by fellow New Journalist George Plimpton. Capote’s new style of reportage involved casting aside the pretence of objectivity and authorial distance, though there was a price to be paid for this. Infamous shares its acting riches around, foregrounding a killer cast including Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee, Sigourney Weaver and Isabella Rossellini as Capote’s society “swans”, director Peter Bogdanovich as his agent, Gwyneth Paltrow in a tasty cameo as a nightclub chanteuse, and Daniel Craig (the new James Bond) in a superb casting coup as Perry Smith, the condemned man whose emerging relationship with the author crystallises the personal and ethical dilemmas that Capote would carry away from the Kansas prairies.

Infamous goes to show that there is more than enough mileage in Truman Capote to make two very fine but very different films.

London Film Festival