«The Capote tapes», portrait of a superlative man even in his defects (score 8)- Corriere.it

«The Capote tapes» I tapes di Truman Capote, by Ebs Burnough is a very interesting socio-cultural investigation (visible on Sky Arte and on demand) based on the unpublished, mysterious, much sought after and never found posthumous novel by the greatest and snobbish writer American who died in 1984 from excess of life at the age of only 59. Famous for two antithetical novels, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (hence the famous film that elegantly betrays the much cruder and less romantic book) and "In Cold Blood", reportage of a terrible crime event that took place on November 15, 1959 in Kansas, where the Clutters, a farming family of 4, was murdered by two criminals, precisely, in cold blood.

Capote's book, translated into 37 languages, it appeared in installments in the New Yorker and then as a best seller in 1965 (with a beautiful film by Richard Brooks in tow) laying the foundations for worldwide fame, outside the living rooms. For the first time the New York VIP novelist, pampered homosexual whose every outfit was a grotesque coming out, looked into the miasmas of reality, developing intense friendship with one of the two condemned to the electric chair: from here, from this sincere impulse, his most heartbreaking truth-book was born. Capote, representative of a gay society that still hid in bars and saunas without the pride of Pride, was born unlucky, in 1924 in New Orleans and moved to Alabama, abandoned by his mother, raised by some aunts or cousins, a family in the disorderly sign of loneliness, aggravated by two great complexes: the bad relationship with the mother - who committed suicide after a second relationship, leaving him the stepfather's name - due to his sexual inclinations and the problem of his height, much below average.

But he had faith in himself, had an affectionate and important friend like Harper Lee (author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" in which Truman also has a small role), wrote incessantly and in 1948 had her first success with "Other voices, other rooms". In the "tapes" of the documentary (as in the other similar one on the Newman-Woodward couple) friendly or hostile voices alternate, because it is known that good society turned against him after the 1987 release of "Answered Prayers" in which he writer recounted secret sins of high society, collected from the voice of his friends party after party, cocktail after cocktail. When high society turned away from him, Truman gave himself up to alcohol, drugs, barbiturates, also left by his friend Jack Dunphy, nor was it enough for him to be an actor in a successful film . That book had been his audacious attempt to become an American Proust (perhaps he was more of an Oscar Wilde), describing high society, but his world, which he himself gathered at the Plaza in a historic black and white party mask, it contained too many duchesses of Guermantes and in the revelations it was shameless, other than the Recherche.

The document, with rare and interesting clips to browse the life of the friend of Marilyn and Kennedy, of Babe Paley and Audrey Hepburn, Warhol and Mick Jagger, of Sinatra and Mia Farrow, is coordinated by George Plimpton, and commented by the daughter of one of his classmates (his friend , despite the bisexual rudeness of his father), by the writers Jay McInerney and Colm Toibin who are experts in biographies, having written a masterful one on Thomas Mann now published by Einaudi. The film about Capote is an X-ray of what we would call New York to drink, of that unruly period in which everything was going on at Studio 54 and in the Village premises, in short, the fall of the Roman Empire before AIDS. And it is the portrait of a superlative man even in his defects, capable of exhibiting what others hid, who also went to Kansas in fur, author of some of the most beautiful books on the hidden realities of the great country from which he had suffered many insults.