Lisa Immordino Vreeland (2020)
It’s actually not much of a conversation at all. Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams – fellow Southerners, friends and professional rivals – talk about their own and each other’s work and psyche, but don’t talk to each other. Lisa Immordino Vreeland makes good use of archive film, especially American TV interviews conducted with each man individually by David Frost in the early 1970s (I remember seeing the Williams one, as a teenager, when it was shown by the BBC). These interviews are interesting in themselves – and some of Frost’s questioning, probing without being prurient, is striking – but there’s not much synergy between the parallel dialogues. There are also extracts from diary entries, press articles and so on spoken by two actors in the subjects’ voices – Jim Parsons reads Capote and Zachary Quinto reads Williams. At first, I feared these drawling vocals would be unbearable for a whole (86-minute) feature. In the event, they’re not: hearing more and more of the real thing in Truman & Tennessee makes you realise that Parsons’ and Quinto’s imitations are hardly exaggerations.
Watching Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s documentary series on Ernest Hemingway on television earlier this year, I kept regretting that I hadn’t read more Hemingway. I wondered, if I’d known and admired his work, whether that might have leavened my antipathy to the person who emerged from Burns’ and Novick’s narrative. I felt something of the same watching Truman & Tennessee. Williams comes over as more reflective and less self-satisfied than Capote, whose practised, bitchy controversialism soon starts to pall, but how much does that impression have to do with my greater familiarity with, and enthusiasm for, Williams’ plays? (I admire In Cold Blood but haven’t read Capote’s fiction.) Both men express some dissatisfaction with screen adaptations of their work. Although he gives Audrey Hepburn credit for a good performance as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Capote felt, probably rightly, that Marilyn Monroe would have been much more suitable for the role. Williams’ regret is larger. He says he’s well aware that in time he’ll be remembered more for the films of his plays than for the plays themselves. The illustrative clips from, inter alia, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) that Vreeland (understandably) chooses to include in her documentary seem to vindicate their author’s melancholy forecast but it hasn’t been borne out – at least not yet. Nearly four decades after Williams’ death in 1983 (Capote died the following year), his best-known plays, at least, are still regularly revived.
14 November 2021
