Film Review: Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation

 

Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams – both literary giants from the American South – are profiled, interviewed and quoted in the fascinating documentary “Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation,” opening June 25 at Landmark’s Hillcrest Cinema.

Williams is primarily known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning plays “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which shocked the Broadway world in the 1950s with their frank portrayals of previously taboo topics like rape, alcoholism, adultery and mental illness.

Capote is perhaps best loved for the film version of his 1958 novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which starred Audrey Hepburn (much to Capote’s annoyance; he wanted Marilyn Monroe).

But he is mainly remembered for creating the nonfiction novel with his shocking “In Cold Blood” – detailing the murder of a Kansas farm family – which became an Oscar-nominated film in 1967.

Both were gay and not shy about it. Both were engaging conversationalists; both had inner demons they wrestled with throughout life.

Williams grew up with a mostly-absent traveling salesman father. He was greatly saddened by the fate of his sister Rose, who suffered from mental illness and was subjected to the then-common “cures” of a lobotomy and 65 electroshock treatments.

Williams was not a social butterfly like Capote, who attended all the fancy parties. “In New York,” he says, “you play a game of importance and start to believe it and so do others. It is all an artificial aura created by New York.”

Capote wanted to be noticed. He succeeded, and once said “I’m famous for being famous.”

Yet this pair became great friends, traveled to Europe together (with their respective boyfriends) and genuinely liked each other. They even came to similar ends, dying within 18 months of each other, of overdoses (Williams of Seconol; Capote of drugs and alcohol).

Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland has assembled an amazing amount of information, quotes and footage from interviews with reporters, notably Dick Cavett and David Frost. In addition, actors Jim Parsons (as Capote) and Zachary Quinto (as Williams) do a very credible job of reading some of the lines from the writings. Major kudos to editor Bernadine Colish for making the whole so very watchable.