Infamous

British character actor Jones looks and sounds a lot like Truman Capote, but that’s all there is to be said for this tin-eared biopic, which is as dim and crass as last year’s Capote was astute and sensitive.

Both pictures cover the years during which Capote researched, wrote and published In Cold Blood, his true-crime chronicle of a multiple murder in Holcomb, Kansas. But in contrast to Capote’s psychologically layered account of how the flamboyantly gay writer won the confidence of his straitlaced Midwestern subjects, Infamous reduces Capote to a braying name-dropper in club-kid drag, and the residents of Holcomb to rubes who would have rolled over for anyone who’d met some Hollywood movie stars. Stupider still is Infamous’ thudding construal of the fraught and complex relationship between Capote and murderer Perry Smith (Daniel Craig) as an overt love affair.

Infamous distinguishes itself from Capote by addressing Capote’s status as a pet of the jet set, but does so in the dullest way imaginable, with a series of distracting cameos by well-known actors (Weaver, Rossellini, Davis) impersonating prominent period socialites to no particular end. As for Bullock’s turn as Harper Lee, the less said the better.—Cliff Doerksen