director
James Mangold
screenwriters
Gill Dennis
James Mangold
based on
the books
Man in Black by
Johnny
Cash
and Cash:
An Autobiography by
Johnny
Cash
Patrick Carr
producers
James Keach
Cathy Konrad
cinematographer
Phedon Papamichael
music
T-Bone Burnett
editor
Michael McCusker
cast
Joaquin Phoenix (Johnny Cash)
Reese Witherspoon (June Carter)
Ginnifer Goodwin (Vivian Cash)
Robert Patrick (Ray Cash)
Dallas Roberts (Sam Phillips)
Dan John Miller (Luther Perkins)
Larry Bagby (Marshall Grant)
Shelby Lynne (Carrie Cash)
Tyler Hilton (Elvis Presley)
Waylon Payne (Jerry Lee Lewis)
Shooter Jennings (Waylon Jennings)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 136m
u.s.
release: 11/18/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
official
johnny cash website
other james
mangold films
reviewed on this website:
- cop
land
- girl,
interrupted
- identity
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Johnny Cash was a giant --
a myth (partly of his own making) -- and Walk the Line
reduces him to just a man. Some of Cash's fans may take issue
with that, but it's something that Cash himself, who stripped
his sound way down in his final decade, might have approved of.
In Walk the Line, John R. Cash (Joaquin Phoenix)
is revealed as a country boy with deep self-esteem problems:
for instance, he has the Stand by Me scene where his perfect
older brother dies and his father rails at God for "taking
the wrong son." John just wants to play music, like the
Carter Family on the radio, especially that cute little June
Carter. He starts out as a fumbling gospel singer at a time when
gospel is on the way out and the axis of rhythm & blues,
rock 'n' roll, and country are taking over music. Luckily he
has his own tune to fall back on, "Folsom Prison Blues"
-- taken not from hard experience but from a newsreel he saw
in the Air Force.
By demythologizing Cash, and
taking him so far into self-abnegation that June Carter (Reese
Witherspoon) even says "Maybe you should take credit for
something," Walk the Line paradoxically restores
the great man's larger-than-life aura. It was hard work to become
"Johnny Cash," the man who seemed to run against all
popular wisdom and come out bigger than ever -- releasing a live
prison album when nobody thought it would sell, covering Nine
Inch Nails in his twilight years, when most singers his age would've
been happy to sit back and cash the royalty checks. Joaquin Phoenix
gets Cash's early insecurity -- he was an original because, frankly,
he sucked at being like anyone else. When we first see him perform
"Folsom Prison Blues" for record-label honcho Sam Phillips,
Phoenix's Cash begins shakily but gains power and confidence.
It's a primal finding-your-voice moment that reminded me of Kurt
Russell blissfully laying down "Blue Moon of Kentucky"
in John Carpenter's Elvis, which this movie most
resembles.
The movie, executive-produced
by John Carter Cash (the only child of Johnny and June), is structured
as a love story between two entertainers married to other people
who don't appreciate their artistry. Cash's first wife (Ginnifer
Goodwin) is drawn as an unimaginative woman who just wants John
to go into her daddy's business. She has a point: he's got a
child to feed and another on the way, and his gospel career is
going nowhere. But success soon comes, and with it the by-now-clichéd
temptations of sex and drugs. Cash gets hooked on amphetamines
and barbiturates, introduced to him by some of the bad boys in
his circle. (Some of them include Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and
Roy Orbison; the movie is particularly fine at capturing a confusing
moment in pop culture, before rock and country definitively went
separate ways.)
What John needs is an equal,
someone who won't say yes to him all the time, and he finds his
redemption in June Carter (Witherspoon hasn't been this vibrant
in years). She's a perky princess in a family of country-music
royalty; he's the strange proto-goth with dirt under his fingernails
and beer on his breath. Nobody wants them together; even June
isn't sure. But John pursues her over the years, and she is touched
by how strenuously he works to make himself worthy of her. Our
knowledge that their union lasted 35 years, until her death in
2003 and his death four months later, helps fill in the blanks
left by a sometimes too-respectful, son-approved script.
Walk the Line is a sturdily conventional biopic,
directed with no special touches by James Mangold (Girl,
Interrupted; Cop
Land). The concert scenes, with Phoenix and Witherspoon
providing their own capable vocals, are just this side of electrifying
-- Mangold doesn't have time to let the performances build. We
get a triumphant rendition of "Cocaine Blues" at Folsom,
but we don't get his San Quentin appearance, with his legendary
reading of "San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell,"
which on the live album gets an audience response unlike any
other you'll hear. Walk the Line tames Cash a little,
and provides no insight into why he would write a fabled lyric
like "I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die."
Phoenix's mercurial performance, less cool than hot-blooded,
tells us some of it, and there are moments when you can honestly
see how Phoenix's Cash could age into the towering oak tree who
cut 1994's American Recordings and, at age 62, became
a bad-ass for a whole new generation.
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