Feud: Capote vs. The Swans

I'm sauntering through Jon Robin Baitz's Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, a Hulu series that I'm finding fascinating and exhausting.

Tom Hollander's Capote is a scarved, behatted masochist who has revealed the unseemly underbelly of New York high society in an Esquire article that leads to the end of his relationship with a quintet of women, The Swans, and banishment from their inner circle. Naomi Watts (Thanks for the catch, Peach!) is wonderful as chief Swan Babe Paley, socialite and wife of media executive Bill Paley (a fine Treat Williams), with whom Capote was especially close and whose friendship the writer missed the most.

I found particularly intriguing episode 5, an imaginary day-long meeting between Capote and Black ex-pat author James Baldwin during the dark days of Capote's alcoholism. Baitz admits the day never happened, and is an encounter between two highly influential gay men of letters, contemporaries but not friends, who responded to alienation and truth in very different ways. Baldwin left America for France many years before Capote's crisis.

Baldwin, played convincingly by Chris Chalk, is Capote's counselor and comforter, pushing the acerbic writer -- who is struggling to finish an imposing new work titled Answered Prayers -- to finish what he has begun, revealing America's falseness and social disparities.

The conversations between the two men are some of the most insightful in the series, with Capote sharing startling awareness of racial dynamics not explored in previous episodes. Capote, famously biting, is likely not to have ever uttered these words or had these thoughts, is just Baitz's tool to air them, but that is fine by me.

Baldwin's part in the epiphany may strike some as a little regressive, magical Negro intervention, but Chalk's portrayal is so self-possessed and clear-eyed I never felt Baldwin was any more than a man shaking some sense into a friend who was wasting his gifts and time.

Were we all to be so lucky to have someone who cared that much to tell us to cut the crap and get back to work!