CNN
—
Producer Ryan Murphy has developed a behavior of diluting his greatest works by in search of to franchise them. In order with “American Crime Story,” “Feud: Bette and Joan” begets the conceptually strained “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” a spectacularly solid ode to New York magnificence and magnificence of the previous that hinges, for higher and ceaselessly worse, on the self-destructiveness of creator Truman Capote.
The promotion may deal with the society girls who the eccentric creator courted, however the linchpin of all of it stays Capote, performed beforehand by an Oscar-winning Philip Seymour Hoffman (“Capote”) and Toby Jones (“Notorious”) in 2005 and 2006, respectively.
Right here, the eccentric raconteur is unerringly dropped at life by Tom Hollander (just lately considered one of “the gays,” as Jennifer Coolidge’s character put it, in “The White Lotus”) with all his tics and excesses intact. Pretty much as good as Hollander is, the construction periodically staggers beneath an eight-part narrative that dizzyingly flits round in time and indulges in flights of fancy like having Capote commune along with his useless mom (Jessica Lange, by now a mainstay of Murphy’s repertory firm).
Having established himself because the life of each celebration and a supply of scrumptious gossip, Capote ingratiated himself to the group, which rewarded him with their friendship and patronage. All that abruptly fizzled, nevertheless, when the author – usually blocked after his breakthrough with “In Chilly Blood” – printed an excerpt in Esquire of a deliberate ebook, “Answered Prayers,” providing a thinly veiled fictionalized takedown of their glamorous lives.
As for the New York elite that Capote wooed and wowed, the women who lavishly lunch include Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), the spouse of CBS patriarch William S. Paley (Deal with Williams, in considered one of his remaining roles), who cheats on her continuously; Slim Keith (Diane Lane), C.Z. Visitor (Chloë Sevigny) and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), the glamorous sister of Jackie Kennedy.
The gaudy solid additionally consists of smaller roles for Molly Ringwald as Joanne Carson, considered one of Johnny Carson’s spouses, and a comforting useful resource to Capote as soon as “the swans” activate him; and Demi Moore as Ann Woodward, who engages in a separate feud with him.
Written by Jon Robin Baitz (“Brothers & Sisters”) and directed by, amongst others, Gus Van Sant (“Milk”), “Feud” once more impeccably captures the interval, whereas peppering the episodes with Capote’s rapier wit, talking strains like “I used to be alone and surrounded by individuals, the worst form of loneliness there may be” and “The appetites are insatiable, however the Swans are by no means full.”
Nonetheless, the episodes get slowed down by the repetitiveness of Capote’s excesses, from his bouts of drunkenness to verbally abusing these round him, together with a boyfriend (Russell Tovey, featured, together with Joe Mantello, in Murphy’s “American Horror Story: NYC”) who responds with bodily violence.
The result’s one other restricted sequence the place extra progressively looks like much less, exacerbated by the actual fact this “feud” his significantly messier than the animosity between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The second version thus turns into most memorable for particular person moments, from Capote’s uncomfortably drunken look on a chat present to his impaired conduct on the set of “Homicide by Dying.”
The shortcomings in the end dilute an abundance of showy performances, with Watts’ Babe maybe essentially the most tragic and heartbreaking determine as somebody who actually liked Capote and located it significantly laborious to half along with his firm.
Capote has remained a supply of fascination lengthy after his demise. But regardless of the form of juicy that has fostered excessive hopes for the venture, “Capote vs. The Swans” isn’t fairly a solution to that prayer.
“Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” premieres January 31 at 10 p.m. ET on FX and streams the subsequent day on Hulu.