\n<\/p>\n
A lot of talent was assembled for \u201cCapote vs. the Swans,\u201d primarily to portray the society women<\/a> the filmmakers chose to represent from among the many who were in Capote\u2019s orbit. (Laurence Leamer\u2019s book \u201cCapote\u2019s Women\u201d is credited as the screenplay\u2019s source.) Those are the show\u2019s real bum roles, unfortunately, and the actresses in them \u2014 Naomi Watts as Paley, Diane Lane as Slim Keith, Chlo\u00eb Sevigny as C.Z. Guest, Calista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill<\/a> and Demi Moore as Ann Woodward \u2014 are mostly reduced to quiet, clenched scenery chewing. Treat Williams as Paley\u2019s husband \u2014 the CBS chief executive William S. Paley who, written as a good-hearted philanderer, comes off better than just about anyone else \u2014 is fun to watch. Jessica Lange is excellent in a handful of scenes as Capote\u2019s mother, who we are to believe is the Freudian root of his troubles; her delivery of the word \u201cjuvenilia\u201d in the final episode is a high point.<\/p>\n As is common these days, \u201cCapote vs. the Swans\u201d comes up with high-concept, fantastical sequences, or entire episodes, for variety and to stretch out the story. The historical record does not appear to include Capote\u2019s dining on a swan caught for him in Central Park, a scene that would have been better left out of the show as well. Chris Chalk is excellent in a cameo as James Baldwin, but the imagined meeting between Baldwin and Capote seems to be there just to make the point that Capote\u2019s society friends are racist as well as homophobic and classist. (Baldwin tells Capote that the novel he claims to be writing about them will be his \u201cslave revolt.\u201d)<\/p>\n Better is another fictional scenario, an entire episode in which the documentarians Albert and David Maysles (who made a short film about Capote for WNET) are imagined to have filmed the Black and White Ball that Capote threw<\/a> at the Plaza Hotel in 1966; Van Sant appears to have been energized by the exercise of recreating the Maysles\u2019s v\u00e9rit\u00e9 style.<\/p>\n Also successful \u2014 to a greater extent than you would expect \u2014 are some sequences in which Capote writes the (as far as we know nonexistent) later chapters of \u201cAnswered Prayers,\u201d and the women on whom his characters are based are seen playing out his fictional scenarios: Guest road-tripping through New Mexico, and Keith loudly telling off the disloyal narrator. Shedding the oddly stylized hauteur that they have been playing throughout the story, Sevigny and Lane are suddenly funny and relaxed.<\/p>\n For every moment that works, though, there are many more that don\u2019t, or that the weary actors are able only to battle to a draw. \u201cCapote vs. the Swans\u201d has neither of the qualities \u2014 the poetic aura or the gimlet, ruthless observation \u2014 that marked the best of Capote\u2019s work. In its flat-footed censoriousness, it\u2019s more like the writing that got him in trouble in \u201cLa C\u00f4te Basque, 1965.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n