No more biopics!

Sorry, but Capote, Ray, and Walk The Line have little in common. Capote is the best of the three. By concentrating on one episode in the title character's writing life, director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman shun the layers of apocryphal nonsense which have attached themselves to Capote as firmly as Capote himself did to the likes of Bianca Jagger and Nancy Reagan. We have a film in which the creators, with little cant and with great delicacy, give the title character the space to condemn himself for his own bad faith. In its attention to the often violent collisions between the artist and his environment – is creation a mimetic process or one requiring the artist's intervention to produce the desired results? – Capote says more than 8 1/2.

Walk The Line is more like Ray, only not as good. Where Taylor Hackford showed the legend making music, James Mangold shows us a one-dimensional, pill-poppin' basso who incidentally wrote and performed some great songs; it was a Lifetime movie with spiffy production values. At no point is the Cash persona deconstructed; Mangold, his screenwriter, and Joaquin Phoenix really did believe The Man in Black bullshit (in Ray, we do see Ray Charles as the calculating sumbitch he was canny enough to become when it suited his purposes).

Finally, the film's creators ignore the most interesting character. In Reese Witherspoon's hands, June Carter sparkles with a vitality and wit that Phoenix's Cash never approaches. Like Miller's treatment of Harper Lee in Capote (played with quiet avidity by the amazing Catherine Keener), Carter's marginalization upholds the fallacy to which every man succumbs when he produces a film about a Tex Bad Boy: art is for boys.