A glossy, empty melodrama that glorifies glossy, empty people

FEUD: CAPOTE VS THE SWANS ✸✸

There was never much chance that season two of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series Feud would eclipse the first. Despite the original’s biggest weakness — a puddle-deep script so short on insight it seemed to have been researched by reading a couple of Wikipedia pages — it had bulletproof subject matter.

The ferocious hatred between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford lasted from their Hollywood peak in the 1930s and 40s up to and beyond the co-starring project that rejuvenated their careers, Robert Aldrich’s gaudy 1962 classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

ENMITY

Feud: Bette and Joan, which dramatised the making of the movie and the way it fanned fresh flames of enmity between the two, benefited from excellent performances by the perfectly chosen pair of Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange (a Ryan regular) as, respectively, Davis and Crawford.

There’s certainly no shortage of talent, female and male, in this second season, Feud: Capote vs The Swans (Disney+, out now). The stellar cast includes Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Demi Moore, Chloë Sevigny, Calista Flockhart, Molly Ringwald, Russell Tovey and Treat Williams (one of his last appearances before his death).

Ideally, the cherry on top should be Tom Hollander as Truman Capote. Nobody can fault the star of Rev, The Night Manager and season two of The White Lotus for not giving it his flamboyant all as the writer, yet neither he nor anyone else involved, including director Gus Van Sant, who handles six of the eight episodes, can breathe the faintest sign of life into the miniseries.

Capote changed literature twice: first with the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was turned into an iconic, if sanitised film, and again with his “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood, about the murders of four members of farming family the Clutters in Kansas.

Capote effectively invented the true-crime genre — although few books since have come close to its brilliance.

The writing of the latter, the betrayals Capote committed to get what he wanted, and the ultimately destructive toll it later took on him emotionally and creatively, has already been dramatised in two films: Capote, which won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar, and the following year’s Infamous, which many believe should have done the same for Toby Jones.

Capote spent the rest of his life trying, and failing, to write something as good, and it ended up destroying him as he got lost in alcoholism, drug addiction and violent sexual relationships, particularly with John O’Shea (Tovey), a married man with children who insisted he was neither gay nor bisexual.

Unless your taste runs to a graphic and tediously repetitive account of someone falling apart, this is the least interesting period of Capote’s life. Unfortunately, it’s the one that’s covered in Feud.

Rather than telling its story chronologically, which might have helped, if only a little, it switches between different decades. In the 1950s, Capote inveigles his way into the inner circle of the Swans, New York City’s fabulously wealthy, influential socialites.

Their leader is Babe Paley (Watts), wife of NBC president

‘Babe is the only one of the Swans who resembles anything like a human being’

Bob Paley (Williams).

Babe is the only one of the Swans who resembles anything like a human being. The rest are just rough sketches, interchangeably glamorous, snobby, bitchy and self-obsessed.

Later on, one of the Swans will viciously describe Capote as “a homosexual court jester, singing for his supper.” Unkindly as it’s meant, it’s true.

The Swans find Capote’s catty indiscretions and seemingly endless supply of juicy gossip hugely entertaining. He, meanwhile, sees them as material for his next novel, Answered Prayers, which he imagines will put him back at the top of the tree.

He gets no further than publishing some extracts in Esquire, one of which features a barely-disguised version of Babe arriving home, as the real Babe did, to find her husband scrubbing his mistress’s menstrual blood off the carpet.

The horrified Swans freeze him out. All this happens in the opening two episodes; the remainder are about Capote trying to gain re-entry and forgiveness.

Feud: Capote vs The Swans is a glossy, empty melodrama that glorifies glossy, empty people.

All episodes of Feud: Capote vs The Swans are now streaming on Disney+