The work, lives and personal journeys of two iconic American artists coalesce with creative combustion in this innovative dual-portrait documentary.... (Full plot summary below)
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The work, lives and personal journeys of two iconic American artists coalesce with creative combustion in this innovative dual-portrait documentary.
Leave your thoughts about Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation.
| Los Angeles TimesGary GoldsteinVreeland’s documentary serves as both a wonderfully evocative time capsule and a candid tribute to a pair of artistic legends. |
| The Irish TimesTara BradyAn anecdote concerning the “amusing, bright, and always very vinegary” Gore Vidal being caught by a woman police officer breaking into Williams’s New York apartment would, alone, make Truman & Tennessee required viewing. |
| Movie NationRoger MooreDrawling, florid Southern homosexuals who were “out” long before that was done, or safe to do, they make a fascinating, intensely quotable pair of wits in Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation, a documentary built on their relationship with each other, their art, their respective psyches, fame and the world they lived in. |
| Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovUltimately, Truman & Tennessee is a fascinating but melancholy mash note to the enduring friendship of two genius misfits who, despite constant self doubt barely masked by a raconteur’s seeming insouciance, rocked the literary (and cinematic, despite their mutual distaste for filmic adaptations) world at, in hindsight, just the right time. |
| Original-CinLiam LaceyThe emotional tone here is sympathetic and elegiac, and since both men have a way with words, often absorbing. Though there is little here that won’t be known by fans of the writers, the format of the interviews is striking. |
| The New York TimesBen Kenigsbergthe connections drawn in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation are sufficiently instructive that watching and listening to these writers is also, in a way, like hearing one author in stereo. |
| EmpireIan FreerTruman & Tennessee: An Intimate Portrait’s staid approach doesn’t always cohere into a gripping yarn but it is detailed, boasts a real feel for the fiction and, in-between the two men’s rampant viciousness, emerges as undeniably poignant. |
| VarietyPeter DebrugeIt’s a pleasure to spend an hour and a half in the resurrected company of these two intellects, but the experience feels like the lazy alternative to reading biographies about either man, while the iMovie-style editing strategy of slow-fading between layers of old photographs makes them feel like ghosts of a long-forgotten past. |
| User ReviewBrent_MarchantBringing together the insights and words of two legendary writers in one film is an intriguing approach to the biographical documentary genre, an approach employed cleverly and skillfully in this offering from director Lisa Immordino Vreeland. By combining archive interview footage of the two literary icons with voiceover narrations of their writings read by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto, viewers see a picture emerge not only of these two gifted artists, but also the parallels between their respective backgrounds, the nature of their longstanding friendship and the ways in which their personal lives influenced their work. These discussions are supplemented by numerous clips from film and television adaptations of their novels and plays, including "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "Baby Doll," "Night of the Iguana," "The Glass Menagerie," "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "In Cold Blood," to name a few. While this release is not always especially revelatory about either of these well-known individuals, it's nevertheless quite intimate and authentic in their on-screen depiction, especially in the archive interviews conducted by David Frost, Dick Cavett and Tom Brokaw. If nothing else, this film puts an interesting spin on its material and brings its protagonists back to life, even if only for a little while. |
