Rank & Bile At The Movies - The LFF Premiere Of Infamous

Thursday Lulu and I saw the London Film Festival's premiere of there totri=oduced the film and it't mor life in Capote'second half.premiere Infamous, directed Doug McGrath who was also there to introduce the film and its stars.

The film follows the same route taken by last year’s Capote, telling the story of Truman capote’s writing of “In Cold Blood” in Kansas. But unlike last years Capote this film successfully illustrates the contrast between Truman’s life pre Kansas and after and the effect it wrought on his life and career. The opening scenes are of Truman’s glittering and gossipy life in New York and are very amusing which make the contrast with his 5 years researching the gruesome murders in Kansas, so marked, in fact the film veers so violently from light to dark it’s almost like two separate films.

Had Infamous been the first version of the story to be filmed, it might have been regarded as triumph—in no small part because of Toby Jones's performance, which is much closer to the Capote we all know, the impish troublemaker, storytelling partygoer, who always seemed larger than life. The likelihood though, is that Phillip Seymour Hoffman despite being physically all wrong for the part will be the performance that’s remembered; especially now he has the Oscar under his belt.

The start of, Infamous is its strength its witty and stylish and it plays like a gossip column, glossy and star-spangled, with Isabella Rossellini as Marella Agnelli, Gwyneth Paltrow as Kitty Dean, Sigourney Weaver as Babe Paley, Peter Bogdanovich Bennet Cerf and Juliet Stevenson (brilliant) as Diana Vreeland.

The second half treads the same ground as Capote and to be honest maybe not as well and the contrast with the first half is so great it sucks all the life out of the story even Sandra Bullock as Harper lee can’t lift it back up and Daniel Craig as Perry is a particularly bleak performance.

On the whole a more enjoyable film than Capote but just too dark in its second half. I’m not sure the events in Kansas warranted a second film but there’s a lot more mileage in Capote’s life beyond the writing of “In Cold Blood”

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