The second season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud is a sadder and slower entry into his canon of true story-telling, leaning heavily on a verdict about the cost of a single work of art.
Hollywood heavyweight Ryan Murphy has had a bit of “ick” about him in the last few years. He faced accusations of breaking the picket line during last year’s Writers’ Guild strike. Stories about unhappy cast members bubble up from the past sets of his many series. Dahmer, the story of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and a monster hit for Netflix, faced criticism for being voyeuristic; the families of Dahmer’s victims were upset about what they viewed as profiteering from their pain. There is also garden variety criticism that some of Murphy’s work just isn’t that great.
His latest real life retelling, Feud: Capote vs The Swans, coincidentally or otherwise, prods at some of the questions that dog Murphy and the cultural landscape at large. Can you, and should you, separate the art from the man? What is fiction, what is fact and what is a justifiable blurring of the two? What lines are crossed in pursuit of a great story, and when, if ever, is it worth compromising the trust of friends and family to tell it? How close is too close?
Capote vs The Swans is the second season in Murphy’s Feud series. The first season dramatised the well-documented rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. The central feud in this season exists between writer Truman Capote and a bevy of powerful New York high society women known as the “swans”. It’s based on the book Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era by Laurence Leamer.
Set across several decades between 1955 and 1984, the inciting incident for the feud occurs in 1975, following the publication of Capote’s ‘La Côte Basque, 1965’ in Esquire magazine, billed as an entree to his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers. Capote was one of many writers credited with the birth of “new journalism”, joining Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe in blurring the lines between the literary style of writing associated with fiction, and straight reporting. ‘La Côte Basque, 1965’ blurred lines further and was a thinly veiled “fictionalised” and scandalous account of the inner lives of the swans, women Capote revelled in being around but was forever studying.
The series details the fallout after publication, as several swans pledge to ruin Capote for his betrayal of trust. For most of the show, he remains unrepentant. He was an insider but always, by his own assertions about the role of the writer in society, on the out.
The cast, as with most Murphy vehicles, is star-studded. Naomi Watts plays Babe Paley, an American style icon, wife of TV executive William Paley, and head “swan”. Diane Lane is Slim Keith, and Chloë Sevigny, herself sometimes named the “it girl to end all it girls”, is C.Z. Guest. Calista Flockhart makes a welcome return to the screen, dripping with acid as Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Demi Moore and Molly Ringwald play Ann Woodward and Joanne Carson, respectively.
British actor Tom Hollander is unrecognisable as Capote. The physical transformation, the voice mimicry and the elevated mannerisms grant Hollander centre stage in most of the scenes he’s in but raise a common question about the line between caricature and truly great performance. That feels especially pertinent because Capote was openly gay. While we’ve gotten miles past a singular gay stereotype in film and television, the myth of the effeminate sad man with mother issues still persists. Jessica Lange’s “bad mommy” roles now haunt Murphy’s shows, and her turn as the ghost of Capote’s mother almost serves the mythology of Murphy’s worldbuilding as much as it does the show’s.
Ultimately, because the story is so centred around Capote, as he lurches from bon vivant to poison-penned viper, journeying from the top of the heap as faithful companion to drug-addled decline, enough is revealed about his inner life to land Hollander’s performance on the side of great. Gus Van Sant directs six of the eight episodes, and his faithful adherence to the style of Albert and David Maysles (Grey Gardens) in the third episode, which documents Capote’s sociey peak at the Black and White ball in 1966, and his own humanistic approach to bringing subcultures into the light, gives us more of an insider’s view of Capote and his motivations, than any of the other characters.
Watts is quite perfect as a cold yet vulnerable Paley. A beautiful bird trapped in a gilded cage, Watts plays her with an icy fragility. Watts’ precise movement, as she pats her bouffant and pulls on gloves for yet another society performance, is a physical manifestation of the freedom of wealth and the entrapment of societal position.
Paley, with her revealed insecurities, gets more exploration than any of the other women. Sevigny, as C.Z. Guest, the most empathetic of the swans, operates as something of a moderator between Capote and the women. She brings an almost unbelievable earthiness to a woman who once told the Washington Post, “If you have money and servants then you’re helping somebody. If rich people didn’t spend money the country would be in much worse shape than it is today.”
Flockhart hisses, bitter and brittle, forever in the shadow of her sister. Lane remains a consistently enraged force as Keith throughout. Towards the end of the show, Sevigny’s character tells Capote that his biggest sin wasn’t the betrayal of trust but the reduction of the women to “two-dimensional caveman drawings”. That Lane and Flockhart’s characters don’t really sing more than one note across the eight episodes doesn’t seem like an issue of performance but instead reveals the limits of writing an ensemble drama with an adversarial premise at its heart.
The use of dreamscape, relentless time-hopping, and a bottle episode in which Capote spends time with writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin renders chronology useless in tracking what is consequence and what is prelude. The only sure thing is that you are witnessing Capote’s decline, perhaps at the hands of the women who cut him out of their lives, perhaps at his own. The time jumps are frustrating to follow at times but give the show a different pacing to the first season.
Ultimately, it’s worth watching. It’s beautiful, with no detail spared in revealing the literal interior worlds of three decades of New York high society life. Actors playing real people always start at a disadvantage, but the cast – Hollander, Sevigny and Watts in particular – deliver more than enough to avoid death by a thousand comparisons. Departing from Murphy’s pacier and more sensationalist retellings of true life stories, it benefits from sitting with the misery and sadness. It could have been gossipy plot points, high drama, great costumes and climatic performances from a cast of divas. Instead, it is a tragedy in several acts that delivers a verdict: the risk Capote took as a writer in observing the highest echelons didn’t pay off.
The show takes a risk making that judgment call, but it undoubtedly makes a worthy contribution to a debate Capote played a big role in stoking about where fact ends and fiction starts.
All eight episodes of Feud: Capote vs The Swans are streaming now on Neon.