“Capote” and “Infamous” are two movies that came out within a year of each other that covered the exact same events, Truman Capote’s writing of the non-fiction novel “In Cold Blood“. I recently finished In Cold Blood for an assignment in humanities class and was extremely curious about how Mr. Capote learned so much about the killings. The two movies gave a (sometimes conflicting) glimpse into this process.
“Infamous” starts a little earlier than Capote and focuses more on Capote’s eccentricities. Throughout the movie, there are faux interviews with those who knew Capote at the time of the book, his high class friends. While it relies more heavily on the viewer’s knowledge of the plot of the book and fills in the surrounding characters, the timeline is considerably off. For example, the killers never move prison cells, even after they are sentenced to death.
“Capote” sort of looms over Infamous as a symbolic 800 pound gorilla. With much more publicity, I was expecting it to be better and the truth was that it lived up to my expectations. It was clear that Capote had a higher budget than Infamous and felt more like how I imagined the story to go (albeit much darker than Infamous).
Infamous focused more on how Capote gained access to the small town of Holcomb and eventually fell in love with Perry Smith while Capote was more about Capote’s obsession with the book and how it affected him psychologically. Both movies are quite well done and I would recommend both of them to anybody curious about the man behind In Cold Blood but if you only watch one, Capote should definitely be it.
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