The soignée swans steal this show

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This article was published 23/03/2024 (912 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, the latest of Ryan Murphy’s elegant bitchfests, the great American writer Truman Capote gets top billing. But it’s the swans — Capote’s socialite friends, all well-groomed women of a certain age — who really steal the show.

This instalment of the anthology series (which debuted on F/X and is now streaming on Disney+, with new episodes every Wednesday) centres on a circle of close but competitive women — Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart) and C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny).

Truman (Tom Hollander) is their intimate friend, their close confidante, their constant lunch companion, at least until he publishes La Côte Basque 1965 in Esquire, a barely disguised story of their sexual scandals, salon gossip and deeply private pain.

The feud is on, and Truman is sent into social exile.

Directed by Gus Van Sant and scripted by Jon Robin Baitz, Capote vs. the Swans, like so many Murphy productions, is at once lavishly good-looking and slightly trashy. At first it seems to offer style at the expense of substance.

But in this world, style is substance.

Twenty-something ingénues may be beautiful by an accident of nature. The beauty of these older women is an act of will, a triumph of taste. These are women, as one character remarks, who know “the difference between fashion and style.”

Watts, Lane, Flockhart are compelling, their beauty burnished and individualized by time and experience. Sevigny, who has never been conventionally pretty, is now even more fascinating to watch. There’s a highly dramatic drop-in by Demi Moore and a welcome return of onetime gen-X icon Molly Ringwald. The 74-year-old Jessica Lange, a Murphy muse, appears briefly as Truman’s late mother in what could be a Freudian manifestation, a drunken hallucination or an old-fashioned Southern Gothic haunting.

These are actors who have managed to do interesting work after age 40 — the age at which so many Hollywood women drop off a cliff — but who are still shamefully underused. It’s this neglect that makes Murphy’s ongoing celebration of older women so necessary. He has worked with Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, Mia Farrow, Jennifer Coolidge. For all its high camp, the last season of Feud, about the battle between aging divas Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) and Joan Crawford (Lange), was partly a poignant exploration of ageism, misogyny and the treatment of middle-aged women in the entertainment industry.

The swans have a certain look — the soignée hair, the ’70s hostess dresses, the crocodile bags, the Hermès scarves. In their homes are exquisitely arranged tables, Porthault linens, Manets and Gauguins. This mastery of surfaces is brought to a high art, in Truman’s connoisseurly opinion, by Babe Paley. According to Truman, Babe had only one fault: “She was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect.”

Just as intriguing to Truman as the women’s perfection is their pain, the sorrowful underside of all that perfection. He calls it “ballerina pain,” the wounded feet that support the illusion of effortless beauty and grace. “I love them for that rigour,” he says.

The show is frank about the labour that goes into beauty, but it’s also nonjudgmental about artifice, as with a scene in which Lee Radziwill, evaluating herself in a mirror, tenderly exposes the stitches of a ’70s facelift.

The series isn’t subtle. It begins with a scene of Truman staring at actual swans on an actual pond. And just in case we don’t get the message, he later informs us that swans may look serene, but under the water, they must paddle twice as fast as ordinary ducks. Sometimes, he suggests ominously, swans even drown “under the weight of all that beautiful plumage.”

In the series’ third episode, the (real-life) documentarians Albert and David Maysles are filming Truman as he prepares for his famed 1966 Black and White Ball. This legendary New York society event is to be a masquerade party. Again, the script doesn’t leave anything to chance, punching the notion that “life itself is a masquerade” and style is always the best costume.

As preparations for the evening are underway, a member of the film crew asks Babe directly why there seems to be “a natural relationship between gay men and these glamorous women.” Both groups understand “the importance of presentation,” she replies. “It’s how we defend ourselves.”

Capote vs. the Swans is not necessarily brilliant TV. The scripting is often clunky, the themes are a little obvious, and despite Hollander’s efforts, the Capote-in-decline trope becomes a bit of a bore. But in the show’s passionate concentration on the faces of Watts, Lane and the others, as they reveal both their characters’ outer style and (occasionally) their inner lives, we see this defence.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca