Hindsight aside, Infamous stakes its claim with the tag line "There's more to the story than you know." That's inarguable, but it's a stretch to say you get more here than a better title. The narrative—and stop me if you've heard this before—finds the self-absorbed scribe (Toby Jones) roused from his New York high-society cradle by a grisly multiple slaying in Kansas, about which he decides to write. Accompanied by his boyhood pal, bird enthusiast Nelle Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock, who seems content to merely read her lines), Capote travels to said backwater and initially intimidates the friendlies with his flamboyant dress and très gay mannerisms. He ultimately wins them over, though, via show-offy tales of movie stars and royalty.
This indirectly leads to his relationship with the two killers themselves, particularly sensitive psycho Perry Smith (Daniel Craig), a painter, singer and (more bluntly here than in previous incarnations) probable homosexual constrained early on by abusive alcoholic parents. Friend Truman half-guiltily strings the pair along for years for the sake of his book, and possibly falls in love with the mutually smitten Smith in the process. When the murderers hang, he's left to pick up the pieces of his fractured psyche as best he can—which, according to all accounts, isn't very well.
In the same way that Capote excelled as a tightly focused character study, Infamous works best as a panoramic, Hollywood-glitzy biopic. The action (such as it is) opens up to include more of the writer's Gotham social circle—big personalities like Diana Vreeland, Babe Paley and Bennett Cerf, played in varying degrees of scene-hoggery by biggish names like Juliet Stevenson, Sigourney Weaver and Peter Bogdanovich. Director Douglas McGrath (Emma) relies on these performances and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel's sunny compositions to give the movie a general breeziness, and the resulting variation in tone is actually an improvement over the relentless gloom of Miller's film.
But, like Capote, Infamous pivots on its lead performance, and despite Jones' ideally pixieish stature and adeptness with that helium-squeal of a voice, he lacks the gravity to convey a serious writer coming to terms with his messy amorality. There's an antic quality to his interpretation that's more caricature than inhabitation—a flaw that, along with the movie's propensity to tell rather than show (it's peppered with awkward, faux documentary-style expository "interviews" with peripheral characters), makes it the lesser work.
Timing is everything, of course; these shortcomings wouldn't be so glaring had Infamous been released prior to Capote, and people may well have been bowled over by it (they might anyway—it's a calculated crowd-pleaser). Given the versions' stark similarities, perhaps Warner Bros. should've released it last fall and let the two movies go head to head. Truman, had he lived, likely would've approved.