Philip Seymour
Hoffman came to check out the competition, and he liked
what he saw and heard. His starring role in Bennett Miller's
Capote was the talk of the sold-out 32nd Telluride
Film festival, which took place during the four-day Labor
Day holiday weekend. Hoffman's performance as fey New
Yorker Truman Capote, in Kansas to report on Perry
Smith and Dick Hickock, the murderers Capote wrote
about in his 1966 nonfiction novel, In Cold
Blood, wowed many of the 2,000 pass-holders at this tiny
Rocky Mountain ski resort. An Oscar nomination for
Hoffman appears inevitable, observers said, and
Catherine Keener, who costars as novelist Harper Lee,
could find herself in the supporting actress race.
Other likely
Oscar contenders who emerged during the fest included
Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, who star as Johnny
Cash and June Carter, real-life lovers and country
music icons, in James Mangold's $25 million Walk
the Line. Sony Pictures Classics'
Capote and 20th Century Fox's Walk the Line
both portrayed young artists in the process of
finding--and losing--their way. Capote fell
victim to ambition, celebrity, and alcohol; Cash had
to battle his way out of an amphetamine addiction
before he could win his singing partner's hand in marriage.
A clip of the
young Cash also popped up in another movie about the
creation of a cultural giant--Martin Scorsese's No
Direction Home, a portrait of Bob Dylan. Scorsese
allowed Telluride a one-time-only screening of his
3-1/2-hour documentary, which recounts the
transformation of teenage Midwesterner Robert Zimmerman into
the channeler of the '60s zeitgeist. PBS invested
early in the documentary and has insisted on
premiering the film, which will not receive a
theatrical release.
Telluride
audiences also were buzzing about director Ang Lee's elegiac
Western Brokeback Mountain, which should
catapult Australian actor Heath Ledger into a new category,
that of serious actor. He also could find himself
chasing Oscar glory, though the box office prospects
for the Focus Features film were the subject of
serious debate. The film is a heartbreaking gay romance,
which novelist Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted
from Annie Proulx's short story about two cowboys in
the '60s and '70s who feel compelled to hide their
passion for each other. One school of thought held that
Jonathan Demme's award-winning Philadelphia,
starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, is the
exception that proves the rule: It's impossible for a
gay love story to find mainstream audience acceptance.
Others argued that, backed by critical raves and Oscar
nominations, Brokeback Mountain could become a
must-see for serious cinephiles.
Cillian Murphy,
currently in theaters with Red Eye, was another
of the actors who made an impression at the festival.
He stars in yet another movie about sexual identity, Neil
Jordan's Irish comedy Breakfast on Pluto, which
the director adapted with Patrick McCabe from McCabe's
novel. Also set in the '60s and '70s, the Sony
Pictures Classics release centers on Patrick "Kitten"
Braden, a winsome cross-dressing Irishman who goes
through many misadventures as he tries to find the mother
and father who abandoned him at birth. Liam Neeson
plays a key role as a Catholic priest.
Liev Schreiber,
the New York theater and film actor, searched for his
roots while filming his directorial debut, Everything Is
Illuminated, in contemporary Odessa and the
countryside outside of Prague. His adaptation of Jonathan
Safran Foer's 2001 novel stars Elijah Wood as a young
man trying to find his grandfather's Ukrainian
village. Former Soviet screen star Boris Leskin and
Ukrainian-born New York musician Eugene Hutz play his tour
guides. "They both learned Ukrainian for the part,"
Schreiber said. "That's more than you could ask."
Raised in the
Eastern European film tradition by his family, Schreiber
brings the absurdist humor and rhythms of the films of Milos
Forman, Dusan Makavejev, and Emir Kusturica to the
movie. Speaking by phone from the Venice International
Film Festival, Schreiber said, "I had wanted so much
to make this a European film. Jonathan and I compared
stories of our grandfathers. I wanted to show their
survivor's sense of humor: If you believe your life is
excrement, then you either drown in it or transcend it
with irony. That's a distinct Eastern European trait."
In addition to
Everything Is Illuminated, Warner
Independent Pictures brought the Berlin International Film
Festival prize-winner Paradise Now, a timely
chiller that is sure to ignite an explosion of controversy.
Filming on location in the West Bank city of Nablus,
Palestinian writer-director Hany Abu-Assad gets inside
the mind of a suicide bomber (Kais Nashef) as he faces
the prospect of fulfilling his religious mission to martyr
himself on a Tel Aviv passenger bus. By turns compassionate
and lecturing, Paradise Now had Telluride
audiences on the edge of their seats. It remains to be seen
if the coming media firestorm will propel filmgoers to
theaters. "It's insane to continue this circle of
killing," the director told the Telluride crowd. "I
hope I make people question without telling them what to
think." The film opens September 14 in the Palestinian
territories and will debut in Israel in October.
Fox Searchlight
debuted Scott McGehee and David Siegel's family drama Bee
Season, adapted by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal from the
Myla Goldberg novel. It stars Richard Gere and Juliette
Binoche as Kabbala followers who become overly
invested in the success of their ace speller children,
played by newcomers Flora Cross and Anthony
Minghella's son, Max. Judging from the festival reaction,
Fox Searchlight should find receptive audiences on the
art-house circuit.
All of these
films will enter the crowded Toronto International Film
Festival fray this week armed with a serious boost from
Telluride. Sony Classics, especially, built advance
hype for its fall-winter slate, which includes
Capote and Breakfast on Pluto; two Cannes
prize winners, Michael Haneke's contemporary thriller
Cache and the intense emotional drama
L'Enfant (which was part of a tribute to its
directors, the Dardenne brothers); and Michelangelo
Antonioni's 1970s classic The Passenger, which
stars Jack Nicholson and is being reissued in advance
of a DVD release.
Actor-turned-director Andy Garcia was one of the filmmakers
looking for buyers at Telluride as he unveiled The
Lost City, a project that has taken him 16
years to complete. Similarly, director Stuart Gordon
showed off Edmond, which David Mamet adapted
from his provocative stage play. And Hans Canosa bowed
the romantic drama Conversations With Other
Women, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart
as former lovers who reunite at a wedding. Roadside
Attractions and several other buyers were circling the
Garcia film, which stars the director as a Havana
nightclub owner who fights to save his two brothers and his
fiancee from Castro's revolution. Bill Murray
contributes a comic turn as the film's writer, the
late G. Cabrera Infante, and Dustin Hoffman appears as
Meyer Lansky. Admittedly inspired by his Godfather
III director, Francis Ford Coppola, Garcia, who
struggled with an overlong screenplay, may have to trim the
historic epic before it wins release. "I finished the film
in 35 days," Garcia boasted.
Conversations, whose split-screen technique met
with mixed reaction, went over best with women and is
expected to find a distributor. Edmond, on the
other hand, hit Telluride audiences between the eyes
with its assaultive portrait of an uptight racist
(William H. Macy) who lets loose one night in the
red-light district, meets a young waitress (Julia Stiles),
and winds up on a spree of violence. First
Independent, which was seeking a buyer, will likely
wind up distributing the film. "It's the most challenging
thing I've ever done," Macy said. (Anne Thompson, via
Reuters)