Damaged Souls
Questionable relationships are at the heart of 'Infamous' and 'Deliver Us from Evil'
By Andy Klein
Finally: a week with no new remakes. Yet you could easily mistake Infamous for a remake of a film too recent to afford such treatment - last year's Capote, which won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar.
Writer-director Douglas McGrath, in an amusing and gracious introduction in the production notes, writes, "I felt a word was in order about the unusual situation that exists between my film and Capote. Who knew that Dan Futterman, the gifted screenwriter of Capote, and I would be in the same predicament as those people who made the competing asteroid-hitting-the-earth movies?"
Indeed, the two projects developed concurrently and were shot fairly close together; the release of Infamous was delayed until after Capote had run its course.
Still, it's not merely that both movies are about Truman Capote, but that both cover exactly the same time period and events - from his reading about the slaughter of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, through his courting of the killers, the police, and the town, and on to the executions and the publication of his subsequent bestseller. As a result, comparisons are even more inevitable than usual.
The main narrative differences are that McGrath cleaves more relentlessly to Capote's POV; and that, since his film is adapted from George Plimpton's oral history of the author, there are cutaways to his famous friends being interviewed about him. Not the real people, à la Reds, since all but one are dead: Babe Paley, Diana Vreeland, Gore Vidal, Slim Keith, and Bennett Cerf are portrayed by Sigourney Weaver, Juliet Stevenson, Michael Panes, Hope Davis, and Peter Bogdanovich.
But these are all small roles, and the project depends heavily on the performance of the relatively unknown English actor Toby Jones - he played Mr. Smee in Finding Neverland and did the voice of Dobby in the second Harry Potter film - in the title role. Unlike Hoffman, Jones is as tiny as Capote was, and he bears a much stronger facial resemblance; plus, he arrives unencumbered by associations with other films in the audience's memory.
He is remarkably convincing, but the depth of his portrayal is limited by the material. That is, if the tragedy in Capote was austere, here it's sentimental. Yes, McGrath is still concerned with Capote's moral compromise, but he puts greater emphasis on his bonding - romantic love, even - with killer Perry Smith. The central issue is "love betrayed," whereas the earlier film was more profoundly about "the self betrayed" and, by extension, "everyone betrayed." At least one colleague has referred to Infamous as "Capote lite."
Jeff Daniels is perfect as head detective Alvin Dewey, and Sandra Bullock is adequate as Nelle Harper Lee, though she never brings the character alive the way Catherine Keener did. However, Daniel Craig, the upcoming James Bond, is woefully miscast as Smith - too tall, too handsome, too middle-class.
It is possible that many of these negatives are a result of Infamous coming out after Capote, but I suspect that, even had it arrived first, it still would have been in second place.
Capote was homosexual, which of course immediately brings to mind thoughts of pedophilia ... if, that is, you have the mind of Newt Gingrich.
That's certainly not the smoothest segue I've ever written, but it's actually not as irrelevant as it might seem to open a discussion of Deliver Us from Evil, Amy Berg's riveting, horrifying documentary about Oliver O'Grady, a Northern California priest who molested untold numbers of children (as young as nine months???) and whom the church never punished or even restricted from further contact with kids. O'Grady, now living in Ireland on a church pension after serving seven years in prison, granted Berg substantial interview time. It's a sign of how skewed his view of reality is that he presumably thought he would come out looking good.
Back in the '70s, the parents of one of O'Grady's victims were convinced not to go to the authorities, after local church officials promised to transfer him to a distant parish where he wouldn't have contact with children. It was all PR: O'Grady was transferred to another assignment 50 miles away, where he continued to be entrusted with kids.
This happened at least two more times; in one case, he was sent to a small parish where there was even less oversight of his activities.
Berg interviews lawyers and priests; it is a sign of the church's remarkably perverse priorities that one of them, Father Thomas Doyle, has been punished with undesirable assignments because he encouraged victims to speak out. (And I foolishly thought that the South Park episode "Red Hot Catholic Love" was an exaggeration.)
At the heart of the film is the Jyono family: At 39, daughter Ann has seen her entire life spoiled as a result of the years of molestation she endured; her parents - who so trusted O'Grady that they put up his bail after one arrest - are wracked with a guilt that seems irreparable, for effectively inviting O'Grady into their family. The Jyonos' self-recriminations are among the most moving, disturbing things I've ever seen on film.
The contrast of their deep, genuine torment makes O'Grady's pathology seem even more horrible. He may really think he's sorry for what he did, but all the evidence of his manner and language suggest otherwise. Despite the charming Irish lilt in his accent, there is a lack of emotion in his delivery; he even chuckles when describing how confession and penance were all the church asked of him for his sins ... after which he could go back to what he was doing. It is telling that he generally refers to his crimes without including himself in the locution: He'll say, "It should not have happened" or "That's when a lot of the Howards' situation took place" rather than "I should not have done it" or "That's when I molested the Howards' child."
In fact, he's a personality so defective, so presumably incurable, that he's more like a destructive automaton than an evil person. The real villains are those like our own Cardinal Roger Mahony, then Bishop of Stockton, who knew what was going on and, seeing nothing beyond a PR problem, condoned, covered up, and enabled such behavior to continue, in at least one case making it easier. Also in the rogues' gallery is Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was supposedly the Vatican's point man on this problem, before assuming the alias of Pope Benedict XVI and requesting George W. Bush to affirm his immunity from civil suits by victims' families.
Then there are clerics like Mahony aide Monsignor Cain, who, during a deposition, says (on camera), "We knew you were being abused, but you were a girl, so we took it to be natural curiosity. Had it been a boy, we would have done something, because that would have been obscene." To his credit, Cain, unlike Gingrich, knows that you can't equate homosexuality with pedophilia. The problem is: He thinks homosexuality is worse.
Published: 10/12/2006
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