On my last morning in Telluride, halfway through breakfast at Butcher & Baker, Kenneth Branagh stopped at the table on his way to a Q&A for “Into the Breach,” the National Theatre documentary he produced. He had a story. A night earlier, he’d ridden the gondola up in pitch darkness with Willem Dafoe, Tom Hiddleston and Andrew Scott — four of the best actors alive, each with a film at the festival, sealed in one cable car with nothing to look at and nothing to do but talk. All anyone could hear was Dafoe. Branagh, laughing, called it “the wisdom of Willem.” A voice in the dark, no face attached.
I half-believed it until a few hours later, waiting out my flight at Montrose, when I ran into Hiddleston on his way back to the U.K. He told the same story, unprompted.
That’s the festival. The Telluriders have gone home, Venice wraps in a few days and we came down the mountain knowing more about this Oscar race than we did going up. Christopher Nolan’s mythological epic “The Odyssey” is still the one to beat. It won’t be a cakewalk. Here’s what else I carried down.
“The Debut” handed Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti their moment.
Jesse Eisenberg’s third feature behind the camera premiered Saturday night. By the next day, it was the hottest ticket in town. “The Debut” drops Moore’s Mona, a meek suburban homemaker who lands a bit part in a community theater musical, into the front of the best actress race. It’s the funniest, warmest thing she’s done in years. Giamatti, whom Eisenberg calls his “favorite actor,” plays the tyrant director shaping her. During one rehearsal scene between them — a master-class, no other word for it — the Telluride crowd applauded in the middle of the movie. You rarely see that happen once at a festival. It happened again before the credits.
