TV Review: "Feud: Capote vs. The Swans"
The new season of the Ryan Murphy production is a well-crafted, if slight, look at an era quickly fading into the past.
Hello, dear reader! Do you like what you read here at Omnivorous? Do you like reading fun but insightful takes on all things pop culture? Do you like supporting indie writers? If so, then please consider becoming a subscriber and get the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. There are a number of paid options, but you can also sign up for free! Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and now, on with the show!
I seem to be one of those in the minority when it comes to Ryan Murphy productions. Though I find them wildly inconsistent and prone to self-indulgence, I’ll admit that I’ve loved everything from Nip/Tuck to American Horror Story, Pose to Hollywood. And, of course, I found myself quite enraptured by the first season of Feud, which gave us ringside seats to one of the most infamous spats in the history of Hollywood: the bitter enmity between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, particularly as this played out during the filming of their horror camp classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.
Now, after a several-year hiatus, Feud is back, this time focusing on the fracturing of the friendship between noted public figure and writer Truman Capote (played by Tom Hollander) and his group of female socialite friends (known collectively as the Swans). When the series begins Truman swans about New York City with his female besties, including Slim Keith (Diane Lane), C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), and such lesser lights as Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) and Joanne Carson (Molly Ringwold). The real lodestar of his life, though, is Babe Paley (played with a cool grace by Naomi Watts), and it slowly becomes clear that, in many ways, she is a replacement for his mother (Jessica Lange), who died of an overdose when he was in his twenties. When he publishes a short story that is a thinly-veiled exposé of their private lives and foibles, the fallout ultimately ruins his life–both personally and socially–exacerbating his struggles with alcoholism and addiction.
As I finished the series, I found myself somewhat divided in my conclusions. On the one hand, I was never less than entertained, and there’s no doubt that this is a sumptuous production, anchored by some strong directing by New Queer Cinema giant Gus Van Sant (who directed several of the episodes). At the same time, it also sometimes felt superficial, and I’m not sure that we ever get to the heart of Truman Capote, who sometimes seems more like a creation or a cluster of affectations rather than a real person. This is in marked contrast to the first season which, whatever its flaws and distortions of history, at least gave us some understanding of the two women at its center, two fading stars who could never quite overcome their antipathy toward one another to find common cause against the industry that desperately sought to exploit them for its own gain.
This isn’t to say that the performances aren’t exquisite. Tom Hollander seems to be building up a resume playing dissolute and venomous homosexuals (see also: his inspired performance as Quentin, the dissolute and murderous queer in the second season of The White Lotus). While I’m not sure that his performance as Capote comes as close as Toby Jones in the criminally-underrated Infamous, he does a fairly solid job here, giving us a Truman Capote who is, for the most part, quite well-aware of how ridiculous and campy he is. There is, moreover, a great deal of hurt lurking always beneath the surface of his venom, and we see it emerge in both his fugue states in which he converses with the venomous shade of his dead mother or in his ill-fated dalliances with numerous straight men (Russell Tovey even makes an all-too-brief appearance as a mustachioed and violent piece of rough trade). I’ll have more to say on Truman in a few weeks when he’s the subject of a Sinful Sunday essay, but for now I’ll say that Feud paints him as a man desperately yearning for love and connection, even as he is also caught up in a cycle of self-destruction.
The Swans are equally divine, though for the most part they are too superficially painted to us to really understand them. Two exceptions to this are Watts’ Babe Paley and Sevigny’s C.Z. Guest. The former is a statuesque but troubled woman, someone whose outer grace conceals a great deal of inner torment and anguish, whether at the numerous infidelities of her husband or the distance that exists between herself and her daughter. Indeed, one of the finest moments in the entire series occurs when Babe listens in to a conversation between and her daughter as she knows she is dying, and Watts perfectly captures the agony of a mother realizing that her daughter wants nothing to do with her, even when it’s clear that she’s dying. Sevigny, likewise, captures a woman with a steely heart but, alone among the Swans, she offers Truman the forgiveness he so desperately craves.
Despite its strong performances, the series is hampered by its tendency to shuffle back and forth in time. While I don’t have a problem with this by itself, it does sometimes make it difficult to keep track of what is happening when and how each incident connects to the others. It sometimes felt as if each episode was taking place within its own self-contained temporal space, making it difficult to trace development across time. This is a repeated problem in many of Murphy’s productions. Perhaps if the series had been released all at once it wouldn’t be quite such an impediment, but given the weekly release schedule it hampers the viewer’s grasp of overall character development.
Strangely enough, though, there is a thematic throughline running through the two seasons of Feud. Like Davis and Crawford, who scrambled to keep their careers afloat as Hollywood changed around and beneath them, Capote and the Swans have to contend with a changing New York. For me, one of the best episodes of the series is “Has, Gloves and Effete Homosexuals,” which makes it clear just how much New York has changed beneath their feet, leaving both Capote and his beloved Swans adrift in a world they barely understand and which seems to have no place for them. It’s one of the few things that links them together in the aftermath of his betrayal, and it’s quite wrenching for them all to realize that the bond between gay men and wealthy women–once one of the mainstays of New York high society in the period–is just another casualty of the changing times.
Is Feud a great series? No, I honestly don’t think so, nor do I think it is one of Murphy’s more insightful productions. Nevertheless, it is not without its pleasures. If nothing else, it offers a glimpse into a past world in all of its glamorous and ephemeral beauty.
TIL Tom Hollander and Tom Holland are not the same person.