The one thing Walk the Line does absolutely right is to show how different June's approach to performing is from Johnny's—she thinks of herself as a purveyor of conventional entertainment and no more. She's not reaching for anything onstage because she knows real life is lived before and after the show. This is great for Reese Witherspoon as June because it calls for some authoritatively fast, comic shifts at the margin between backstage and onstage. The complementary excitement in Witherspoon's performance comes from seeing June's professional manner flicker on and off; the more genuine emotion she feels, the less expressive she becomes in public. And Phoenix's Johnny is constantly going at her to respond to him, onstage, offstage, no matter where they are, who's watching, or what other demands there may be on them.
Walk the Line didn't make me want to listen to Johnny Cash but to see Phoenix's next movie. (I would also like to see the complete versions of the Johnny-and-June numbers that director James Mangold cuts away from, as if we were more interested in his narrative filmmaking than in seeing the stars whack the songs home.) Capote is all super-intelligent, though partially compromised, text. Hoffman puts himself at the service of the text and that's clearly enough for a lot of people. But when I think about Capote I think about Capote himself, not Hoffman.
Note: Capote doesn't go into Smith's hair-raising description of how the murders resulted from the "frictional interplay" between him and Hickock, as told in In Cold Blood. (This omission may be a let-down to readers of the book after such a big deal is made about what Capote has to do to get the information.) This article from Court TV's Crime Library goes intriguingly further, suggesting that the murders resulted from the dynamics of a homosexual relationship between Hickock and Smith.
You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.
Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Fine delineation of the distinction between instinctive acting and method acting. I'm assuming here that Hoffman is in some form a method actor
Vikram (?) did a documentary on In Cold Blood a couple of years back. Have you seen that?
2 - Alan Dale
Hey Aaman,
Thanks for the comment. Hoffman doesn't strike me as a Method actor, exactly, in the Brando mold. He seems more methodical than Method, doing the work from the outside in as much as the inside out. He's very good, but lacks the detachment, the point, the high-style flair of other obvious actors, like John Malkovich, for instance.
I haven't seen that documentary--do you know the name or any other identifying info?
3 - Aaman
Ah, I was mixing up James Ellroy and Truman Capote - the filmmaker is Vikram Jayanti and the documentary is James Ellroy's Feast Of Death