DOUBLE CHILL BIOPIC

Truman Capote spent six years writing In Cold Blood, his haughtily self-professed "non-fiction novel." It took about half as long, 40 decades later, for the production of two feature films focused on its saga, suggesting the quintessentially flamboyant author's final work has a backstory with potential for multiple angles resembling his famously experimental narrative. The odd accident of a scheduling conflict reveals that might not be the case.

While writer-director Douglas McGrath's Infamous takes a slightly more probing (and critical) look at its curious protagonist's emotional conundrums, it's hardly more than a funhouse mirror alteration of a predecessor's droll routine. That would be Capote, of course, last year's obligatory Oscar-baiting biopic. The chatter back then mostly had to do with Philip Seymour Hoffman's utterly convincing transformation into the little man of yore, a magnificent temple so worthy of worship as to obscure a fairly mundane tempo and morose tone that played against the story's central personality. The new movie is an improvement, but only slightly; the inadvertent lesson being that the best part about In Cold Blood is In Cold Blood itself, regardless of its author's sparkling idiosyncrasies.

Read the rest of the review at The Reeler...