What made Truman Capote so popular? During an era in which being openly gay was illegal and Liberace was flat out lying about his sexuality, Capote just didn’t care. It was his own persona. He had written books like Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood and became a bestselling writer. In his 70s, he was still going to porno theaters to watch Deep Throat and hang out at Studio 54 during a time when this was frown upon by the society around him.
The fact that Capote would hang around the upper elite women of the time speaks to how how boring it could have been for them. These women practically had all the money they could ever have but they couldn’t be satisfied. Feud: Capote vs. The Swans doesn’t have the sass and bite the first season did as it focused on the rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, portrayed respectively by Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, who appears here as Capote’s mother. Ryan Murphy, who spearheaded this anthology, managed to show that the rivalry between Davis and Crawford was mostly something perpetuated by the misogynistic, sexist studio heads who exploited the aging stars to sell movie tickets. It was something like the East Coast/West Coast rivalry of the rap/hip-hop scene of the 1990s.
But the main focus here is that Capote (Tom Hollander) was too busy reading his own press thinking he was more popular than he was. Capote is struggling to write his next novel Answered Prayers after the success of In Cold Blood. But in the 1960s and 1970s, he’s stuck enjoying the celebrity status more. In 1975, he allowed Esquire to publish a story excerpt title “La Cota Basque: 1965” which some people believed was about Ann Woodward (Demi Moore), a socialite who was falsely rumored to have intentionally killed her husband, William Woodward Jr., a wealthy heir to a bank fortune. It had been suspected Ann shot William because she thought he was a burglar. However, others had felt the shooting was intentional.
Upon publication of the story, even though it used a different ficitional name, many assumed Capote was accusing Ann, who would later commit suicide by cyanide poisoning. The death would cause conflicts among the other socialites, known as The Swans. Hollander does his best but his performance is more of a typical impersonation. He doesn’t get the heart of Capote the way Philip Seymour Hoffman did in Capote. His role is more similar to Toby Jones in Infamous.
But the real problem with the eight-episode series is there isn’t much interesting material to necessitate its length. And all the time jumping around doesn’t add much to the narrative. You get confused about who is who. You could tell who was Davis and who was Crawford in the previous season. It just seems here that the characters pop up on screen whenever it feels like they haven’t been shown in a while. Also, Capote is portrayed as a very unlikeable person so it’s hard to feel any sympathy for him. Maybe it’s because in the seven years since the first season, we’ve gotten more lax about what we see in TV shows now. Therefore, when Capote offers to perform fellatio on a young handyman, it feels more gratuitous and extraneous than it does necessary.
Diane Lane and Calista Flockhart seem to have fun playing a the mean girls style of socialites Slim Keith and Lee Radziwell respectively, but they’re portrayed too one-dimensional. Naomi Watts is the only one who evokes some empathy as Babe Paley, wife of William S. Paley (Treat Williams) who was the CEO who built CBS from a radio station to a top TV station. But it’s mainly because Babe died of lung cancer and everything seemed to be building up to it. Her lack of parenting skills and apathy toward her children, which was well known, is only mentioned in passing during a scene that seems like it was added as a obligatory moment of mention but never does add to the series.
Chloe Sevigny appears as C.Z. Guest who remains friendly toward Capote while the others mainly avoided him. And Molly Ringwald, for the most part, barely appears as Joanne Carson, second wife of the famous Johnny Carson, whose only real reason for being in the series is that she was the one who Capote was with when everyone else including C.Z. and his on-again, off-again partner Jack Dunphy (Joe Mantello) had cut him loose. Joanne kept Capote’s cremated ashes after he had died up until her death in 2015 and at which time they were auctioned off in 2016.
The series theorizes that Jack had the completed manuscript to Answered Prayers and burned it. To echo sentiments of other critics, this plays more like a Real Housewives series rather than finding its own identity. The original idea for the second season was to focus on the relationship and marriage of King Charles, when he was still a prince, and Diana Spencer. Yet Covid and some other works, such as 2021’s Spencer probably put the brakes on that.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 