Truman and Tennessee: Documentary Captures Prickly Literary Giants In Soft Glow of Nostalgia
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
You can’t watch the new documentary Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation — about the 20th century American literary stars Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote — without being freshly amazed at the cultural treasures found in 1960s and ‘70s television talk shows.
Tennessee Williams.
The best of these programs, hosted by David Frost and Dick Cavett, featured interviews with writers, politicians, old movie stars and newly minted celebrities, who were encouraged to let it all hang out on TV. Sample episode: Surrealist artist Salvador Dali brings an anteater onstage on a leash to join silent film star Lillian Gish and baseball legend Satchel Paige.
As well as helping chronicle Watergate and Vietnam, these programs offered direct access to such figures as James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Marlon Brando, William F. Buckley Jr., John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Janis Joplin, Norman Mailer and Muhammad Ali, making them a prime source for countless documentaries on these figures.
Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s film is in the same television clip tradition and contrary to its billing, never involves the two writers talking together. Instead, we get a collage of TV clips, movie adaptations, photographs and audio interviews telling the parallel stories of Williams, a pre-eminent mid-century American playwright (The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire) and Capote, the social gadfly and meticulous prose stylist (In Cold Blood, Breakfast at Tiffany’s).
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The two first met when Capote was just 16 and Williams an established writer of 29. They were friends, and sometimes not friends, for years. Both had difficult childhoods, achieved early success, were Southern and openly gay. In middle age, both were addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol, and died within 18 months of each other in the 1980s. In later years, Capote was cruel to Williams, though he says they reconciled before the playwright’s death.
In this otherwise fluid package, Vreeland employs one clunky technique, using actors to read out passages from the subjects’ writing or print interviews. The actors are Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto, who recently worked together in the stage and screen remount of The Boys in the Band.
Quinto has Tennessee Williams’ gravelly register right, but he can’t quite land the warm whisky-soaked tone. Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) takes a run at Capote’s high sibilant quaver, but his own Texan drawl keeps sneaking in. Each time we switch back to the real figures, the effect is distracting.
The emotional tone here is sympathetic and elegiac, and since both men have a way with words, often absorbing. Though there is little here that won’t be known by fans of the writers, the format of the interviews is striking.
How strange it is to watch a television host ask major artists these kinds of three-in-the-morning soul-searching questions: Do you like yourself? How often have you been in love? Is your writing more important to you than your friends?
Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. With Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto. Available now through Hot Docs virtual cinema.