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Naomi Watts plays Babe Paley and Tom Hollander is Truman Capote in Fight: Capote against the Swans.
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Naomi Watts plays Babe Paley and Tom Hollander is Truman Capote in Fight: Capote against the Swans.
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In 2017, the FX network presented the first edition of Ryan Murphy’s Fief, an anthology series dramatizing infamous real-life conflicts. The inaugural edition was called Fight: Bette and Joan, and detailed the intense rivalry between Hollywood stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Now, seven years later, the second installment of Fief has finally arrived.
FX is promoting Fight: Capote against the swans like “the original Real Housewives,” but it’s much deeper than that and infinitely more watchable. Based on the book Capote’s women, by Laurence Leamer, this eight-part series follows Truman Capote’s friendships and betrayals with the most prominent women of New York high society: the ladies who lunch.
Jon Robin Baitz, creator of the ABC series Brothers Sistersdeveloped and wrote this edition of Fief for television, with Gus Van Sant directing most episodes, with others directed by Jennifer Lynch and Max Winkler. However, it’s the names in front of the camera, not behind it, that demand the most attention here. Tom Hollander, from the most recent season of The white lotushe plays Capote and captures him so that Capote is a character, not a caricature.
And all of the women who play the swans get their turn to shine, in a cast list that’s almost ridiculously talented and long. Naomi Watts plays Babe Paley, the wife of CBS president Bill Paley. Calista Flockhart plays Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s sister. Other members of high society are played (fascinatingly well) by Diane Lane, Chloë Sevigny, Demi Moore and Molly Ringwald. Treat Williams, who died last year, appears in his final role, as Bill Paley.
Even Jessica Lange, who played Joan Crawford in the previous Fief series, and helped launch Murphy’s television empire by starring in the first outings of his first anthology series, American horror story, it’s here. She makes a few guest appearances playing Truman’s late mother, and she’s haunting, in more ways than one.
Fight: Capote against the swans jumps through time, showing the characters before and after Don The magazine published a chapter of Capote’s book in progress in 1975. It was a thinly veiled exposé of the privileged, preening women it called “the swans,” and it hurt them deeply. But drama and pain were not new to most of these women.
The first Fief The miniseries veered toward camp at times, but Capote against the swans takes his story more seriously. It has the loving details of a Downton Abbey or a Bottom up – lots of lingering shots of food, fashion and jewelry, but this drama occurs almost exclusively upstairs. And Baitz and Van Sant, in particular, frame things beautifully.
Capote’s famous black-and-white masquerade ball in 1966 is the subject of the entire third episode, and is filmed, almost entirely, in black-and-white. This is because the Maysles brothers were filming a documentary about Capote that same year, allowing Fief adopt that perspective to interview some of the Swans about their literary relationship.
Capote against the swans deserves our attention. It’s a good drama, a compelling story with a powerful cast, and in this new installment of FiefThey all do very powerful work.