Breakfast At Tiffany’s — Truman Capote

Breakfast At Tiffany’s
a book by Truman Capote
Wiki | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2 and -2
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Many times in the course of my life, glaring omissions in my knowledge of the world appear, realizing recently that there was a book (novella) version of the famous movie Breakfast At Tiffany’s was one of those things. I have had the movie in my Netflix queue for ages, but just about anything sounds better and it doesn’t move up. Truman Capote arises on Jeopardy! fairly frequently. He’s supposed to be really famous for being a great writer too. My knowledge of Truman Capote was, “Isn’t he some dead writer dude?” So I was completely shocked that he’d written something I’d heard of.

Now, let us get into the book itself. I was very very interested by the beginning, where the narrator of the book sounds a lot like I imagine Capote himself would have sounded. It was that kind of book, where enough facts coincide and it looks like the author’s fantasy life spilled onto a public page. But the narrator starts out saying that it never occurred to him to tell the story of this everyday experience/life he had even though it’s clearly what he really knows. Modern advice-for-writers pounds that idea so heavily that creativity can have its edge blunted. Some other modern advice is to “show, not tell”, but this is very terse narration with bits of really dramatic scenes. Pretty much all the advice I have ever seen for authors is tossed out the window with Breakfast At Tiffany’s. And yet, the writing in this is stunning. I found myself wanting to go back and read portions again.

The quality of writing and the degree of control in this book and by this author is enormous. The flashbacks aren’t tightly reined, but I followed along without error. The characters live in my imagination despite my not knowing anyone like any of those people. The world described is something I can see in my mind’s eye. You see? It’s brilliant. Hands down, utterly brilliant.

And it’s all fucking wasted on the most loser story in the history of the planet.

Flighty useless woman lives in New York City, has a flighty useless life, gets lots of men panting after her, continues being flighty and useless, book ends.

In a recent post about Arabian Nights, I said, “To my mind, there should be a penalty for doing a mediocre job with a great idea, thus wasting the idea.” I wish we could have combined some of the really amazing story ideas out there with the writing efforts of Truman Capote.

I will be pulling the movie from my queue. I can’t imagine a way that the movie would be anything less than disappointing since the only thing I liked from the book was Capote’s work.

I read one of the following short stories and again found the writing very elegant (sparse alternating with glorious detail to keep the reader’s attention focused) but again the story was so horrible (not gory or sad necessarily, or even badly written, just why would you ever want to read that?) that I felt physically ill.

Truman Capote was really extraordinarily talented and wasted it writing depressing stories wrapped in frivolity about nothing. If he could have taken that ability to capture the essence of a scene and used it to document history, I think generations of schoolchildren would stop thinking history was for the dead. If Capote could have actually used his imagination and gone for the kinds of world-building we see in Tolkien, Peter Jackson would have been too busy to do Lord of the Rings.

So the writing in Breakfast At Tiffany’s is about as close to godlike as I have seen, but the story was flat-out nauseatingly bad.

Roman Holiday

Roman Holiday
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +0
Apparent Rating: 6/10

There are frequently lowered expectations when seeing a movie or reading a book which is a classic that has been used as an archetype for others of the sub-genre, simply because exposure makes what was novel seem trite. I have seen a re-make of Roman Holiday, Chasing Liberty, without knowing whence it came. I remember thinking when watching Chasing Liberty that some of the things they did seemed unexpected, without conscious rationale— today I realize they were consciously emulating Roman Holiday and everyone was expected to have the reference.

From a coherency perspective, Roman Holiday is superior because it stands alone. From a story perspective, assuming one has seen Roman Holiday, Chasing Liberty is better because of the ending and because modern emotional reactions are much more approachable to me than someone from my great grandmother’s time. There was this big to-do about a woman wearing pyjamas and I have no understanding of what the problem is. The princess offers just the top half as an option. I suppose it might be uncouth for a woman to wear trousers in public, but in bed? There were a number of things like that where “common culture” meant they didn’t need to explain and I don’t have any clue why that’s a big deal. The princess seems honestly horrified when she wakes up in a strange man’s rooms but because she’s wearing pyjama pants. Doesn’t it seem like she’d be more upset to not be wearing anything on her lower half?

The ending… No one says Roman Holiday has such a downer ending. Gregory Peck was amazing in it, because he manages to typify the expected stoicism from men but is nearly in tears when the woman leaves him. That’s what makes stoicism so powerful, when we really believe it but are let inside the curtain anyway. It gives leading men an emotional depth because of expectations. I think male actors of modern times have a lot more room for demonstrable emotion, but the stoic thing works for me especially in old movies.

Roman Holiday is in black and white. They go through a lot of effort to tell the viewer that the movie is shot entirely in Rome. They want to indicate that the scenery is for real. But then they filmed it in black and white! Since it’s after The Wizard of Oz, we know color film technology existed. Thus it is sheer laziness and cheapness that they did not bother. I give them zero points for showing “the real Rome” since they didn’t bother to do it right and in color, like actual reality. I somehow doubt that a visitor to Italy would have found Rome to be colorless in 1955 as if color had been invented in California and just hadn’t spread all the way to Europe yet. Thus they did not show Rome and might as well have filmed it in Hollywood. I don’t mind that they didn’t do it in 3-D or smell-o-vision (even if it’s invented soon) because that technology was not readily available when Roman Holiday was made. Movies had been made in color for more than 15 years when this came out.

On the whole, I considered this movie spoiled by the ending. The acting was good. The writing was good. The story made sense. The camera work was good (unlike the hamster-on-crack kind of camera work modern movies use to make things seem frenetic.) I really liked how the movie actually seemed romantic. I liked the comedic parts (which did not have a laugh-track and did not need them.) But a totally unhappy ending made this movie depressing. I’m not surprised it won awards since only downer movies win major awards.

Oh and this is one of those movies with costumes by the famous bitch Edith Head who won a slew of Oscars by stealing other people’s work. That meant whenever I saw someone wearing a new outfit, I wanted to hiss and spit. Knowing she won the award for this movie made me really angry for the people who did the work for no recognition. I think the Academy should have stripped her of her Oscars or at least given retroactive acknowledgement to the actual winners.

I don’t know who told Audrey Hepburn to cut her hair, but I thought the shorter style was much less attractive on her.

I think I enjoyed Roman Holiday, I am sure I would have liked it more if I wasn’t bringing all the baggage along. If I had seen this when it was new and no one had done something like this before, it would have been phenomenal.