The Capote Tapes: Truman Capote Doc Titillating and Weirdly Trying in Equal Measure

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B

In parlance its subject would have understood, the documentary The Capote Tapes, about iconic American writer Truman Capote, feels like something late to the party and underdressed.

It arrives 16 years after the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliantly incisive Oscar-winning portrayal, 37 years after its protagonist’s death, and smack-dab in an era when mocking people — Capote’s hobby, at which he excelled — is rightly regarded as perniciously uncool.

Yet The Capote Tapes is also weirdly fascinating, though one’s tolerance for the film may rest on one’s tolerance for Capote’s famously fey drawl which seems to add satin exclamation points to the end of every statement, and which garlands the film from beyond the grave.

The movie rests on a fairly tantalizing notion: that Capote had surreptitiously but salaciously documented the peccadillos of the high-falutin’ New York society people he hung out with in a manuscript only published in excerpts at the time of his death, but which sealed his fate as an outcast among those he coveted most.

As the story goes, Paris Review co-founder George Plimpton conducted countless interviews with Capote friends, foes, and acquaintances — who describe him alternately as “the most lionised writer since Voltaire” and, perhaps more to the mark, a “candied tarantula” — for a never-completed Capote biography. Thus begins this doc.

The rollcall of commentators is indeed impressive: authors Jay McInerney and Colm Tóibín plus TV presenter Dick Cavett (always wonderfully insightful) and journalist Sally Quinn alongside recollections from Lauren Bacall, Normal Mailer, Plimpton…

It’s clear Capote led an extraordinary life among extraordinary people even if he was often invited along as something of a court jester, amusing his rich and famous friends with vicious insider gossip.

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Of course, Capote was legitimately talented. And he got to those Park Avenue parlours via his books: 1948’s Other Voices, Other Rooms which established him as a gay voice in an era when gay voices were at once very dangerous to possess and purposefully unheard.

See also 1958’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s which was boosted on screen by a luminous Audrey Hepburn, and mostly, 1965’s In Cold Blood, Capote's bestselling “nonfiction novel” about the senseless, real-life 1959 Clutter family murders in rural Kansas which formed the template for 20th century crime reportage and cemented Capote’s place in the literary canon.

But while the idea that Answered Prayers — the before-mentioned, unfinished novel propelling the film — radically changed Capote’s status forevermore, it ultimately fails as a concept.

What shaped Capote, the doc seems to say almost by accident, was the stuff behind the curtain of Capote’s own public life: his mother’s suicide, his apparent infatuation with convicted murderer Perry Smith, his affair with the father of model and “adopted daughter” Kate Harrington, who comments here, and chiefly, his wonky relationships with the so-called “Swans.”

These were the patrician likes of Babe Paley, Slim Keith, and Lee Radziwill, who granted Capote entry into the upper reaches of New York society — and whose presence made his 1966 Black and White Ball among the most paparazzi-documented parties of all time — but who abandoned him when it later appeared he’d been taking notes as they made their martini-soaked confessions.

Capote, in the end, could never escape his outsider status despite his fame and wealth. Indeed, he seemed to court it, self-sabotaging his lofty successes with his inability to shut the fuck up about the cool kids he was hanging with for the benefit of the great unwashed.

So yes, appropriately, there’s lots to gawk at and titter about in The Capote Tapes, which benefits from fabulous archival footage, the first-person recollections of key people like McInerney and Cavett, and a rags-to-riches story against all the odds. But no one here gets out alive, figuratively or literally. Decidedly not a tale of redemption.

The Capote Tapes. Directed by Ebs Burnough. With Truman Capote, Jay McInerney, Colm Tóibín, Dick Cavett, Sally Quinn, and Kate Harrington. Available October 26 on VOD/Digital.