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    The Women of ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’ Are Birds of a Feather

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    Famous women play the famous women in Ryan Murphy’s new period drama. In a group interview, they discuss the series and the burdens of public life.The first season of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” aired in 2017. A juicy survey of the bitter rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the co-stars of “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” the show earned 18 Emmy nominations, winning two. A second season, based on Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s troubled marriage, was developed then scrapped, mostly because Murphy felt that he could never outdo “The Crown.” Another iteration, centered on William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, also fell apart. Murphy and his producers toyed with a half dozen other ideas, though never for very long.“It’s very easy to do a show where people are just nasty to each other,” Murphy said in a an interview earlier this month. “But feuds are never about hate. They’re about love.”Then Murphy read “Capote’s Women,” by Laurence Leamer, a gossipy, trenchant study of the novelist Truman Capote and the society women he befriended and later betrayed. Murphy had long been fascinated by Capote. He was equally entranced by the women Capote referred to as his Swans, self-created creatures whom he admired for their style, wealth and savoir faire. Their gift, as Capote wrote in his late collection “Portraits and Observations,” was to offer “the imaginary portrait precisely projected.”Tom Hollander plays Capote, whose betrayal of Babe Paley (Watts) was perhaps the most cutting.FX“It was a full-time job,” Moore said of the roles performed by the real-life women she and her co-stars play in “Feud.” “There were no casual sweatpants.”FXLeamer’s tale had luxury, treachery, artistry and spite. It had love, too, “the very fragile, wonderful relationships that exist many times between gay men and straight women,” Murphy said. With a script by Jon Robin Baitz and direction by Gus Van Sant, the story became “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” an eight-episode series that premieres on FX on Wednesday. (Episodes will stream on Hulu the day after they air.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      How Naomi Watts and Elle Fanning Stay Hungry

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      Naomi Watts: Elle impressed me the first time we met [while making the 2015 film “3 Generations,” in which Watts plays the mother of Fanning’s character]. She was 16, but with such emotional intelligence. When I was trying to get my start in my late 20s, I was already being told I was too late. They said, “You’d better get going. You’ve got only seconds left!” I think that’s changed — for the better, obviously. We’re now seeing women in their 50s carry films. There even seems to be a bit more movement in the opposite direction, like aging is suddenly trending.On the CoverWatts wears a Bottega Veneta dress, $6,600, and boots, price on request, bottegaveneta.com; and Ana Khouri earrings, price on request, anakhouri.com. Fanning wears a Bottega Veneta dress, $20,000.Hart Lëshkina. Styled by Tess HerbertWith women, but never with men, “ambition” always gets labeled an ugly word. I’ve always been hungry, and that’s what got me here. I spent many years under the radar, not getting jobs — just tiny bits here and there — until David Lynch gave me an incredible role [in 2001’s “Mulholland Dr.”]. Had I not maintained that level of determination or ambition, whatever you want to call it, I would have packed it in and just tried to find something else. Knowing why you love what you do is important. What’s feeding you that makes you keep coming back for more?Watts wears a Bottega Veneta dress. Fanning wears a Bottega Veneta dress.Hart Lëshkina. Styled by Tess HerbertWatts wears a Bottega Veneta dress; and Ana Khouri earrings.Hart Lëshkina. Styled by Tess Herbertculture banner More

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      ‘Goodnight Mommy’ Review: Behind the Mask

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      Twin boys worry that their mother might be an impostor in this disappointing remake.Far be it from me to quibble over punctuation, but the absence of the vocative comma in the title of “Goodnight Mommy” — an American remake of the Austrian chiller “Goodnight, Mommy” (2015) — should be read as a warning of other, more problematic omissions.Like the prickling atmosphere of dread that blanketed the original and is only pallidly reproduced here. The plot, though, remains roughly the same: Twin boys, Elias and Lucas (Cameron Crovetti and Nicholas Crovetti), arrive at their mother’s isolated country home after an unspecified absence to find her head swathed in gauze and her behavior apparently altered. Telling the boys she has undergone “a little procedure,” Mommy (Naomi Watts) bars them from her darkened quarters, and also — uh-oh! — from the barn. Is she an impostor?That question will be answered, if without the aesthetic elegance, masterly editing or rumbling horror of the first film. Even so, Kyle Warren’s screenplay is potent enough to generate several moments of suspense, and Watts, an exceptional actor sidelined too often by poor choices, is not the problem here. That would be the decision to jettison the children’s most creative cruelties — and consequently much of the movie’s tension — and a director, Matt Sobel, who’s determined to steer the audience toward a specific interpretation of events. The result is a film that feels lazily compressed and overly literal, suggesting a lamentable discomfort with ambiguity that’s all too common in arthouse-to-mainstream retreads.The new movie’s late-pandemic timing and the ubiquity of masking, however, add a fresh layer to the psychological underpinnings of both films. Perhaps never before have we understood so clearly how much of our ability to trust rests on being able to see the entirety of the human face.Goodnight MommyRated R for disturbing dreams and dirty dancing. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime. More

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      ‘Infinite Storm’ Review: Climb Every Mountain, Ford Every Extreme

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      Naomi Watts stars in a true-life drama about a woman who hiked up a mountain alone and returned with some heavy, unexpected cargo.When performers sign on as producers of their movies it can feel like a statement of intent. That’s the case with the true-life drama “Infinite Storm,” starring Naomi Watts as a grieving woman on an unexpected rescue mission. The movie has an appealing, streamlined trajectory: The woman hikes up and down a mountain, pausing to save a lost soul. With this role, Watts is reminding us that she can hold the screen by herself and without saying a word tell you everything you need to know about a character — and all the while looking fantastic.Early on Oct. 17, 2010, a New Hampshire woman named Pam Bales set off on a six-mile hike up Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast. The temperature was expected to hit the high 20s, with winds reaching 80 m.p.h. Bales, though, was a lifelong hiker and a search-and-rescue volunteer. So she stashed extra layers and snow goggles in her pack before heading into an area she called an office and playground. “At 5,000 feet, about three miles in,” she later wrote in Backpacker magazine, “the wind began to pick up around me.”Even for those who enjoy hiking (on level ground in lovely weather, thank you), this sounds like lunacy. The presence of a sympathetic performer like Watts, though, eases doubts even as it deepens the stakes. You’re already on Pam’s side when she wakes up at home in the gray early morning. Alone, she patters around her isolated house, which is filled with homey touches and picturesquely parked near a river. It’s quiet inside, which prompts you to wonder about the children smiling in the framed photographs. Mostly, you settle into the stillness and vibe on the methodical rhythms of Pam’s preparing for what looks like a very serious hike.The world comes into view and increasingly fills the silence. Pam stops by a restaurant, where she exchanges pleasantries with a friend (Denis O’Hare) and fills in some blanks. It’s a brief, outwardly perfunctory interlude: He tells her to be careful and she reminds him that it’s an anniversary of an unspoken event. The scene seeds the ground with questions (what is she commemorating and why?), but mostly seems construed to appease anyone who might be disturbed by all the quiet and a woman alone: She isn’t a nut, the scene reassures you, she has at least one friend and even a rationale for heading into the forbidding wilderness alone.Pam’s trek is the centerpiece of the movie, and it’s a doozy. The director Malgorzata Szumowska sketches in the forbidding lay of the land with sweeping aerial shots of the snowy mountain range that cut Pam down to speck size. Szumowska also shrewdly uses distance to accentuate Pam’s physicality, allowing you to see the character head to toe, just like when Fred Astaire danced. You see the labored exertion in Pam’s — and Watts’s — every step as clearly as the puffs of frigid air she exhales. As her efforts intensify, she warms up and strips off her shirt, revealing her midriff and the steady tensing of her muscled arms and shoulders.Watts is a supremely expressive actress and, like Astaire, a full-body performer. The image of her frolicking on a cliff for the giant ape in “King Kong” was the best part of that movie, and her character’s thrilling emotional workout in “Mulholland Drive” remains vivid. Watts is particularly brilliant at articulating a character’s inner being; she brings out what lies beneath so clearly and persuasively that you can see every thought and emotion fluttering into existence. That serves her character here beautifully, even if Pam’s goggles can get in the way. I could watch an entire movie of Pam — really Watts — going solo up this mountain.That Iron Woman trek takes a turn when the weather does, and Pam finds a man (Billy Howle) crouched in the snow and nearly frozen. She warms him up by stripping off his clothes (good to know!) and then vows to take him to safety. The going is agonizing, at times gripping, and is slowed down only by gauzy, explanatory flashbacks to Pam’s earlier life. These weaken the momentum; they’re also unnecessary. We don’t need to know anything about Pam’s past because her story is already evident in each step and every smile, and in a translucent performance that confirms watching Naomi Watts on this journey is destination enough.Infinite StormRated R for adult language and suicide ideation. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Desperate Hour’ Review: An Exercise in Panic

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      Naomi Watts plays a mother whose morning jog becomes a nightmare in this thriller from Phillip Noyce.If your 84-minute movie about family trauma turns into a school-shooting thriller but that thriller is also about the family’s mother having the worst jog of her life and that jog includes dozens of phone calls to and from 9-1-1, it doesn’t need a director. It needs a life coach and a personal trainer. The audience, meanwhile, needs a hostage negotiator. That mom? She basically becomes one, too. And because Naomi Watts plays her, it seemed fair to assume that Amy’s helplessness would achieve more than this single note. But nope.Not much time is required to explain what’s happening here. A recently widowed mother of two named Amy (Watts) leaves her teenage son languishing in bed while she gets some morning exercise in the nearby woods of a generic mid-Atlantic town. While she’s out, Amy discovers that someone heavily armed has invaded her son’s school and opened fire. Is he a victim? Is he the shooter?For answers, Amy races toward danger on the ankle she twists, making frantic calls the whole way: to the mechanic not far from the siege, to a friend with a kid at the school, to a Black police dispatcher (repeatedly) named Dedra, who, in the middle of all the chaos, makes time to comfort Amy with lines like, “You did what any other mom would do.”The only thing I want less than a thriller about a school shooting is a thriller whose other main character is the main character’s iPhone. Watts has to conjure anguish from dropped calls and dying batteries, from deceitful ride-share arrival times and unknown callers, from calls that go straight to voice mail. She has to find a way to play the sort of person who’s already taken and made half a dozen mid-run calls before there’s any crisis, someone whom we don’t mind saying something like, “Siri: Directions to Lakewood Community Center. Fastest route” or “You got other people’s kids out. Why can’t you get mine out?”Few screen actors are better at externalizing parental anguish than Watts. The physical beating she took in “The Impossible” felt proportional to her performance of a mother’s determination to reconvene her family. The movie turned the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 into an action-melodrama, but Watts’s mastery of bodily suffering transcended the film’s racial turpitude. Her privileged mommy persuasively stood in for maternity itself.“The Desperate Hour” becomes its own kind of impossible. There’s no way for Watts to make this person more than the most exasperating character I’ve experienced in a work of fiction in a long time. Until Amy, I couldn’t truly have appreciated the difference between courage and effrontery. She guilts that mechanic into some probably illegal sleuthing. And when she makes her urgent limp to the scene holding two phones, it was my turn to call the cops. Amy, come on. That’s your Lyft driver’s phone!Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More