Common Sense Note
Parents should know the film is not for kids. It showcases difficult concepts and images, including mass murder, rape, homosexuality and homophobia, and the sensationalizing effects of media. Images include the Clutter family crime scene (bloody bodies and furniture), as well as several reenactments of violence: shooting, smothering, and an unnerving scene in a prison cell, where inmate threatens visitor. Execution by hanging shown explicitly, as is a passionate, illicit kiss in a prison cell. Characters make repeated references to sex and rape, some joking, some menacing. Characters smoke lots of cigarettes and drink often. Both prisoners and Manhattan socialites use foul language ("f--k" most frequently).
Families can discuss the close relationship between Truman and Nelle, who compete and support one another in their careers. How does the movie characterize their complicated friendship? And how does Truman's relationship with Perry reflect the author's own insecurities and desires to be a respected artist? How can art reshape violence so that it's thrilling or compelling? How does the movie suggest that Capote suffered for his art, his desire to be famous, and his unresolved personal conflicts? Families can also talk about some of the film's underlying issues, such as journalistic ethics, media sensationalism, and the death penalty.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
In INFAMOUS, the second big-screen take on author/socialite Truman Capote's writing of In Cold Blood in as many years (it follows on the heels of the critically acclaimed Capote), the focus is on various judgments of the writer, including his own. Though he insists that "I never judge my characters," it's clear that this Truman (Toby Jones) is wracked by guilt, desire, and need, even as his pursuit of fame and admiration leads him to disregard others' feelings.
Douglas McGrath's movie opens as Truman and one of his many socialite friends, Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver) sit in a swanky night club, watching a sad, lovely performance by Kitty Dean (Gwyneth Paltrow, playing a version of Peggy Lee) of "What Is This Thing Called Love?" While her mid-song break into tears might be staged, it effectively introduces the film's primary themes: Truman's search for love and his blurring of fact and fiction.
Truman's search takes him to Holcomb, Kan., where, in 1959, the Clutter family was brutally murdered by Perry Smith (Daniel Craig) and Dick Hickock (Lee Pace). The flamboyant Truman brings along his subdued, thoughtful best friend, fellow writer Nelle Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock). She helps him seem less threatening to the locals (including Kansas Bureau of Investigations agent Alvin Dewey Jr., played by Jeff Daniels) and, when Truman declares his intention to use "fictional techniques" to tell the story of the murders and the murderers, advises him on the distinction between "reporting" and writing fiction.
To frame Truman's blurring of this and other boundaries, the film cuts away repeatedly and awkwardly to "interviews" with his Manhattan acquaintances, including Marella Agnelli (Isabella Rossellini), Slim Keith (Hope Davis), and Bennett Cerf (Peter Bogdanovich). Based on George Plimpton's oral biography, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, these talking-head scenes become a showy display of famous people playing famous people, unfortunately highlighting the distinction between fiction and fact rather than complementing it.
The narrative, however, is compelling. As Truman's relationship with Perry involves mutual exploitation and seduction, both men conjure romantic fantasies about each other (culminating in a kiss in Perry's cell that leaves Truman unsettled). While Truman is entranced by Perry's violence, he's also afraid of it, seeing an alternate version of himself in his subject. Both men lost their mothers to suicide, both are homosexual during a time when they're persecuted for it, and both find outlets for their frustrations -- Truman in art and extravagant self-styling, Perry in murder. Truman's genius grants him adulation, while Perry becomes "infamous," but Truman is unable to forgive himself.
Families who enjoy Infamous should also read Capote's In Cold Blood or Plimpton's biography and see Capote (which won star Phillip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar) and Richard Brooks' 1967 In Cold Blood -- or, for a different approach to death row inmates and crime and punishment, Dead Man Walking.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentTruman's stories and jokes tend to be bawdy; he behaves flamboyantly (small-towners mistake him for a woman); Truman sends Perry porn magazines in prison (glimpse of covers); frequent sexual slang; references to Dick's desire to rape the Clutter daughter before he killed her. |
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ViolenceExplicit images of the crime scene (bloody mattress) and Clutter family bodies (bound and brutalized); shootings occur in flashbacks and out-of-frame (guns pointed off screen); one disturbing scene shows Perry threatening Truman with rape in his prison cell; Dick's hanging at the film's end is explicit and harrowing (Perry's takes place off screen). |
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LanguageFrequent uses of "f--k" (30+); plus other profanity ("s--t," "bitch," "a--hole," variations of "c----cker"). |
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Social BehaviorWhile the protagonists are charismatic and compelling, they are (with the exception of Harper Lee) also arrogant, ambitious, and deceitful, disdaining their social "inferiors" the story follows Capote's eventually tragic efforts to "fit in" with the wealthy socialite crowd. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoUpper-crusty 1950s-style social drinking and drunkenness (martinis, gin and tonic, scotch, champagne); reference to father "drinking himself to death" frequent cigarette smoking, some cigars. |
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