NOT TRU CRIME

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

When Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood, the film based on Truman Capote's celebrated nonfiction novel, was released in 1967, a number of critics complained that it lacked a point of view. Unable to capture the real merit of the book--Capote's masterly accretion of detail in telling the true story of a prosperous Kansas farm family's gruesome murder--the film meanders about, touching on unoriginal themes: that men can kill with no good reason, that boys brutalized will grow up to brutalize, that the pure of heart often die in vain.

If these ideas were banal nearly 30 years ago, they seem even more so in the context of today's habitually ugly headlines. It is curious, then, why anyone would tackle a remake of the film without having come up with anything more insightful to say about the nature of evil. Nevertheless, In Cold Blood the mini-series arrives this week (Nov. 24 and 26 9 p.m. ET, CBS).

As the killers, Eric Roberts and Anthony Edwards do a fine job conveying vulnerability as well as creepiness. But the movie can't seem to muster much of an opinion about these drifters and their crimes. This conceptual uncertainty may explain strange, meaningless scenes like one in which color suddenly fades to black and white and we see Roberts, moody and shirtless, playing guitar on a boat in Mexico as if he'd run away to a Chris Isaak video. Maybe we are being told that society's true enemy is the frustrated musician.

--By Ginia Bellafante