Feud: Capote vs the Swans
Disney+
High-society feuding and gossip can be entertaining of course, but, whoa, over nearly eight hours? This tale of the toxic fallout between Truman Capote and his bevy of “swans” — coutured New York socialite women with a thirst for high-end white wine — is gorgeously shot, spikily written and far too long. But it is worth your time, if only for the performance of Tom Hollander as Capote, one so grimly hypnotic it is hard to take your eyes off him.
It is surely a daunting task for any actor to follow in the footsteps of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played Capote so brilliantly in Capote. But Hollander’s portrayal of the writer’s descent into alcoholism, drug abuse, self-pity, and the viper-tongued abuse of his lover, whom he met in a sauna (and who responded with fists to Capote’s face), is mesmeric.
He plays Capote with his entire physical being. The paunch, the balding pate, the bloated, sweating face, the shambling, slurring, fall-over drunkenness. Hollander, who received vocal training from Jerome Butler, pitches the famous high-pitched voice with a nervous nasally snicker at somewhere between a whiny five-year-old girl and Tweety Pie. Wait until you hear the sound he makes during sex. It is too convincing. Hollander would not have occurred to me as a candidate to play Capote, which shows why I am not a casting director.
Naomi Watts too offers a graceful turn as Barbara “Babe” Paley, the cheated-on wife of the CBS founder Bill Paley, and a woman who, according to this drama at least, smoked almost as much as Capote. Lord, these lot never stop sucking away, their mouths ceasing to pucker around a fag tip only when they take it out to gossip or glug more Pouilly-Fumé. Babe was the head swan, her life seemingly perfect above water but under the line her legs thrashing because her husband was having sex with another woman, described cattily by Capote as a “fat-ankled harridan”.
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This is a high-end cast, featuring Chloë Sevigny, Diane Lane, Calista Flockhart, Molly Ringwald and an underused Demi Moore. Russell Tovey plays John O’Shea, a Long Island banker with a wife and children who became Capote’s “manager” and lover. The spats between these two are to my mind every bit as ghoulishly watchable as the titular feud. Peevish, narcissistic and three sheets to the wind, Capote taunts O’Shea about his children. “They know Daddy is just a third-rate suburban faggot banker who sticks his uncircumcised penis into …” OK, I probably shouldn’t finish that quotation. I’m sure you can fill in the blanks. It is grippingly vicious.
• Truman Capote and Babe Paley — the society beauty he betrayed
• Capote’s Women by Laurence Leamer review — Truman Capote’s revenge
The series’s driving force is that in 1975 Capote, addled with booze and suffering writer’s block, published in Esquire a chapter from his unpublished book La Côte Basque. It was, in the swans’ eyes, a barely disguised hatchet job and mocked their private lives, insecurities, eating disorders and husbands’ infidelities. They saw it as a stab in their Chanel-clad backs from their former friend, a “homosexual court jester singing for his supper”.
They froze him out, condemning him to a long social death. It mirrors Babe’s long physical death from lung cancer (she died in 1978). While she has chemotherapy, he begs to be taken into people’s Thanksgiving dinners, both of their energies fading.
The story, the second season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud franchise after the series about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, is well told, jumping between years with great style, even if what we are watching — rich people self-obsessing — doesn’t amount to a lot of substance.
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Capote is pitiful by the end, even if you haven’t felt much pity for him. Hollander is undoubtedly the main draw. Though playing an attention-seeking drunk bent on self-destruction at full volume, he manages to avoid caricature and delivers a performance full of nuance and, eventually, pathos.
★★★★☆
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