*** (out of ****)
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Patrick, and Shooter Jennings
Directed by James Mangold & written by Mangold and Gill Dennis, from the books “Man in Black” and “Cash: An Autobiography” by Johnny Cash and Patrick Carr
2005
136 min PG13
The Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line” follows the standard pop star mold pretty closely. He comes from a desperate background, struggles to succeed, becomes a huge star, and then gets into trouble with wine, women, and song, until the love of a good girl telling him “believe in yourself!” sets him straight. But “Walk the Line” is also cut from the same cloth as last year’s “Ray:” both films are energized by strong acting, electric concerts, and a real sense of atmosphere for a quickly vanishing time and place. In many ways, “Walk the Line” is “Ray” from the white side of the tracks, during the same time and roughly the same place. The cinematography and overall styles are similar enough that both films could probably be spliced together into some kind of four-hour extravaganza. If you’re into that.
Joaquin Phoenix, hair-lip concealed, stars as Cash. Whether he accurately portrays the singer is immaterial; Phoenix creates a self-contained performance that doesn’t need to be based on anything. He plays the self-loathing rock star, but with Johnny Cash’s voice. The only way to describe Reese Witherspoon as June Carter (and later June Carter Cash) is that you just want to eat her up. She’s so cute that I think my wife and I left the theater both a little in love with her. At first, Johnny is drawn to her because he seems in a race to escape middle class ordinariness. June’s a seasoned professional on the touring circuit, but mostly she’s just that “other” who’s not his first wife, his mortgage, his responsibilities, etc. “Walk the Line” tracks not just him cleaning up his act but his realization of her as an individual. Robert Patrick plays Cash’s father. This explains why Cash is so tough: his dad was made of liquid metal.
Reese and Joaquin do their own singing, too, which is fun, becomes Phoenix slurs some of the words and misses some of the notes. Too-perfect musicals are not nearly as much fun as the ones that feature men and women who sing because they can’t help themselves, not because they’re always good at it. “De-Lovely” and “Everyone Says I Love You” are fine examples of how imperfect singing is better than the stony perfection of “Phantom of the Opera.”
“Walk the Line” soars in reconstructing a bygone era and, like “Ray,” it lingers pleasantly on the workaday lives of these early rock musicians. They tune their guitars, rehearse, bust their asses in the studio, roam the countryside on tour buses, and fight boredom at motels by making homemade explosives to blow the branches off trees. Phoenix gives a virtuoso scene in which he performs one of his original songs for the first time. He sings it to a skeptical producer and his voice gets stronger and stronger, as he finds his way through the notes. Waylon Jennings, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis all show up on the same tours as John and June. The movie also uses a light hand to track the rural South of the 1940s to the more urbanized 1960s.
In many ways, June and John seem to embody this transition: they mirror changing cultural mores on things like divorce and remarriage, and their new influx of wealth is only an exaggeration of the gradual influx of technology and urbanization into the region, as oil and cattle country turned to cities that tell spaceships where to land. It’s fascinating to watch the world change so much around a little farm boy. One day he’s running barefoot on a dirt road, surrounded by cotton, the next he’s stationed by the Air Force in Germany, and when he comes back, he can live in a city. The world changing around the lone man is mirrored by Cash’s refusal to take credit or accept responsibility for many of his actions. Things just happen.
And there’s the music. I do like Johnny Cash, who was the good kind of country music before country descended into trite, sentimental nonsense, stupid hats, and phony accents. Director James Mangold is heedlessly in love with the bright lights of the stage, the perfect posture and matching outfits of early rockabilly guitarists, the bouncing crowds of exciting, dorky faces. “Walk the Line” doesn’t have much that’s piercing to say about Cash or his life, and is undeniably Oscar bait. But it’s still a good time. After one of the concerts, I almost clapped, not because I’m one of those idiots who claps in movie theaters, but because I was so swept along that I forgot where I was.
Finished Monday, December 5th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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