The Truman Show - Again: A year after Capote, Infamous revisits the same territory - with fresh results. By Phoebe Flowers

The Truman Show - Again: A year after Capote, Infamous revisits the same territory - with fresh results.

By Phoebe Flowers *

When Capote premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, it was generally agreed that star Philip Seymour Hoffman -- who would go on to win a best actor Oscar for the role -- was superb. Another popular opinion held that there could not possibly be enough material to sustain another movie about the same man, revolving around the same time in his life and career. And, even if there was, why would anyone want to see a retread of Capote? Undeterred, Infamous rolls into theaters Friday, a year after Capote. And it turns out Warner Independent Pictures was not completely out of its mind when the studio decided to forge ahead with the seemingly duplicate project. Capote and Infamous "will be, in the short term for people, companion pieces," acknowledged director and screenwriter Douglas McGrath (Emma, Nicholas Nickleby) at this year's Toronto festival. Both movies focus almost exclusively on the six years that Capote spent researching and writing In Cold Blood, a "nonfiction novel" about the brutal murder of a Kansan family of four, and about their killers. The 2005 Capote was adapted from Gerald Clarke's 1988 biography of the writer, while McGrath derived Infamous from the more recent oral history by George Plimpton. The new movie spends more time depicting Capote's lavish New York City lifestyle. Sigourney Weaver, Isabella Rossellini, Hope Davis and Juliet Stevenson portray his coterie of socialites, and Gwyneth Paltrow has a cameo as a singer modeled on Peggy Lee. Sandra Bullock steps into Catherine Keener's Oscar-nominated role as novelist Nelle Harper Lee.

Infamous also has something else last year's film lacked: an utter unknown in the lead role. The casting of Toby Jones, an English actor primarily known for his theater work, could be seen as a negative. But Jones' relative anonymity is actually a tremendous boon for the film, allowing him to subtly slip into Capote's well-documented affectations. He's so good, in fact, that he accomplishes what seems like the impossible -- he makes you forget about Hoffman. "I was never worried" about the competing film, says McGrath, "because I'd been on the set, I'd seen what Toby was doing. I felt I was watching one of the greatest actors I'd ever worked with. ... So I wasn't worried about the comparison. ... "I knew people would like Philip -- he's a great actor. But I knew what Toby was doing. And I don't mean this in a cocky way, I only meant, I know [people were] thinking, 'How could your lead performer possibly compare with Philip Seymour Hoffman?' And all I thought was, 'Well, just you wait.'" Second in line While Capote and Infamous were on basically parallel paths from the beginning, at a certain point it became clear Capote was pulling ahead in the race for a release date. "Even from the day I was sending my script out [in June 2003], we knew about [Capote writer Dan Futterman's] script," McGrath said. "They were going out looking for money, but they had their Truman. We were going out, and right away had money, but were looking for our Truman. ... We found Toby about a year later, maybe more than a year later. And they got their money sometime that fall of 2004." During the course of the three-month shoot, McGrath said he still didn't know which movie would bow first. But Infamous wrapped in spring 2005, several months after Capote, and by last fall, Capote had premiered at Toronto and was being rolled out as an Oscar hopeful. Infamous had to wait patiently for another year. No required reading It might have helped audiences if the situation had been reversed. Infamous is likely to work equally well for a viewer who hasn't read In Cold Blood as one who has; that's a strong plus that cannot be said of Capote. McGrath said this approach was intentional. "One of the tricky things when you're writing is knowing that there will be a certain part of the audience who are coming to the movie because they've read In Cold Blood, they've read the biographies of Truman -- they know a lot coming in," he said. "And then you have to assume there's a whole other audience that's not going to know anything. And it's that careful balance of trying to find a way to get information that's important for people so they understand, without boring the people who already know it."

But McGrath also expresses nothing but confidence about being the runner-up. "I knew we had a very strong group of actors to help tell the story. And I knew that there was so much about his life, even about that period. ... I knew the material didn't suffer from there not being enough good stuff to put in. Two people could come at this story and not step on each other's toes at all." The question is whether audiences will agree, and, on that subject, McGrath accepts that it's beyond his control. "You know, I have no idea if anybody will come to the movie or not," McGrath says. "I hope they will. Our experience is that when [preview audiences] come to see it, they really love it, they really respond to it. "Which is not surprising, because that was Truman Capote's own experience in life. He would come in front of people and they would think, 'I don't think so.' And then pretty soon they're like, 'Hey, we love you. You're fascinating.'" Phoebe Flowers can be reached at pflowers@sun-sentinel.com.

FLOWERS, Phoebe. The Truman Show - Again: A year after Capote, Infamous revisits the same territory - with fresh results.  South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL). McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. October 8, 2006,   Copyright (c) 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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