The Man in Black (and a Man in Drag)

Walk the Line, which opens today, just might be the year's first bona fide contender for a Best Picture Oscar nomination. But that says more about the Academy's often antiquated selections than the quality of the film itself.

This film version of Johnny Cash's life, as directed by James Mangold (who peaked with Copland and has since given us Girl, Interrupted, Kate & Leopold and Identity), so strongly echoes a certain Best Picture nominee from last season that it might as well be called "Ray 2: This Time It's Country!" It's all here: the drugs, the infidelity, the haunting childhood memories, the music that changed the world.

It's tempting to write the movie off as a broken record, but there are pleasures to be had anyway. Cash's music is strong (duh) but the surprise is that every actor in the film does their own singing. Joaquin Phoenix isn't Cash (duh) but he does a pretty good vocal impersonation (and his performance is so deeply felt that it's silly to nitpick about areas in which he's not just like Johnny). Actors playing minor roles of Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis do their part also. The music, produced by T-Bone Burnett, sounds simply fantastic; the movie is most alive whenever it's onstage.

But as great as the music is the movie has one more tremendous thing going for it: the performance of Reese Witherspoon as June Carter. This may be Cash's movie but it's his slow-burning relationship with Carter that drives the narrative and allows Witherspoon to steal the film away from its leading man. She brings so much heart, humor, charm and honesty to the role that she single-handedly makes the whole thing worth seeing. Witherspoon embodies the role so well that it becomes the dramatic equivalent to her brilliant comedic turn in Election (high praise indeed) and will quite possibly get her the Oscar she deserved back in 2000.

Opening in more limited release (and unlikely to ever get very far beyond the biggest markets) is Breakfast On Pluto, the latest film from Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan but probably better described as the movie where Cillian Murphy—most recently seen in villianous roles in Batman Begins and Red Eye—plays a transvestite, Patrick "Kitten" Braden, in 1960s Ireland.

If there's much reason to see the movie at all, which is silly and unsubstantial and episodic in a generally unfufilling way, it would be for Murphy's entirely committed performance. Slightly androgynous to begin with Murphy is ideally cast but it's the performance and not the character that resonates. Bad news for a movie that's basically a character study.

The film unfolds in a series of "chapters" that are loosely built around Kitten's search for his birth parents but there's not much to the story, which was adapted from a book by Patrick McCabe (just like Jordan's previous film, The Butcher Boy). The soundtrack, however, is packed with lively and smart song selections and there are fun supporting turns by several of Jordan's former leading men: Liam Neeson and Brendon Gleeson are the most enjoyable but Stephen Rea isn't bad either (Crying Game fans will be amused at his reaction when Murphy's character confesses his natural born gender).