Walk the Line

Walk the Line is the latest in the flurry of biographies of celebrities made into films. This biopic is about the Man in Black, country singer Johnny Cash. Walk the Line is the best of this recent trend due to magnificent performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter. Combine their performances with a mellifluous script and a tremendous soundtrack of remakes from Cash’s ample vaults and the film is as well balanced and as well executed as one could hope for. I was surprised by Walk the Line. At first coming out of the theater I could not fully appreciate it; the film seemed too easy and seamless, the acting true but unforced. I thought that it was a nice movie but nothing spectacular. Then I started to think about other music biopics and I realized how truly spectacular Walk the Line was.

Of course most of the biopics have things in common. Poor as a child and with some sort of past trauma a man or woman hits the big time. Though fame brings money it also brings hangers on and drugs and alcohol and an unstable life on the road. This strains the old relationships and makes new ones difficult to maintain which leads to further abuse of drugs and/or alcohol. Often there is a disapproving parent for whom all of the money and celebrity is not enough to show a whiff of respect or affection for their offspring. Then there is a bottoming out for the star and usually one or two attempts to clean up at which point the celebrity either dies or straightens up and flies right cleaning themselves up and getting their affairs in order. Walk the Line treads this familiar path but it does it with grace and ease and a fluidity that makes it a joy to watch.

Unlike many of the biopics created in the 40s and 50s the film does not gloss over the nastier aspects of its character’s life. Johnny Cash had a drug problem and it is depicted here as a self-destructive cycle that left him nearly destitute and nearly dead. More recently, Walk the Line is better than La Bamba because it deals more directly with the music and the fame and how it affected the figure than Ritchie Valens’ story could ever fully detail. It is better balanced between the music and the forces in Cash’s life that created the man and the music. Walk the Line is more like Almost Famous if it had focused on the music and the musicians instead of the Rolling Stone writer. There is a lot of time portrayed between being onstage where guys drift along playing music, goofing around, drinking, and chasing girls.

Walk the Line is even better than last year’s Ray because though the story lines are strikingly similar the ensemble acting is better, the story is better constructed, and the action onstage, the music and the character interaction is more lively and involved. Instead of offering labored flashbacks and water imagery, Walk the Line starts, after a brief glimpse of Folsom Prison, at the beginning. We see JR Cash with his brother leading up to that fateful day when his brother is killed. The imagery of those days is then reinforced throughout the film not with drug induced paranoid episodes but with everyday items that bring up old memories, running up a dusty lane, balancing a fishing pole in one’s hand, or viewing a saw blade. There is more meat to Walk the Line as well as it relies not just on Phoenix’s portrayal of Cash, as Ray did on Jamie Foxx, but also on the sturdy shoulders of Reese Witherspoon as Cash’s love interest and fellow singer June Carter.

The story at the heart of Walk the Line is not about life on the road. It is a love story between Johnny Cash and June Carter who were married to other people when they met and ended up married for 35 years dying within months of each other in 2003. Phoenix and Witherspoon, the actors at the center of all of this, prove capable of emotional portrayals, belting out country standards, and acting open and likeable enough to carry the film. Joaquin Phoenix is nothing short of a revelation. We all knew he could act after Gladiator but here he is given the reins to carry or crash a film and he turns in a career defining performance as the man in black. Phoenix’s Cash is at time brash and cocky but overall he exudes an approachability and an uncertainty that make the character endearing. The attire is not a stretch, lots of suits and lots of black shirts but Phoenix has brought Cash to life mainly through
his performances onstage. Phoenix has grasped the contorted and uncomfortable looking machine gun hold that Cash kept on his guitar as well as his sneer and his rapid talking delivery of his most famous country songs. As an actors dream w:st=’on’>Phoenix gets to play a character that is in turns in love, drunk, high, and despondent. What more could an actor ask for except for the accolades of his peers which are sure to follow.

Witherspoon’s June Carter is all humor and big talk to mask an insecure woman from one of country music’s royal families. Witherspoon makes it believable that this woman would travel with a band of guys yet maintain her own identity as a jokester onstage. But she is also able to make Carter vulnerable. There is a magnificent scene where Carter is in a store and a woman comes up to tell her how wonderful her parents are and how surprised she is that they speak to June given that she has divorced her husband. Witherspoon’s Carter is floored but maintains her composure and her Southern manners and answers the ridiculous woman with poise. Of course Carter was married three times and Witherspoon’s Carter is a woman who may protect herself with a screen of jokes but can just as easily be wounded with a sharp comment. Carter’s first two husbands are MIA but her uneasy relationship with Cash is well displayed on screen. Again it is believable that a woman who has made two bad marriage decisions would be a bit hesitant to try a third time with a drug dependent unstable man so Carter’s push-pull restrained relationship with Cash seems very likely. Witherspoon and Phoenix create a familiar but restrained relationship which is made more believable by the fact that it draws near and then backs off and the two grow together without any overwrought balcony scenes.

Robert Patrick is amazing as Johnny Cash’s father Ray who is a recovering alcoholic for whom none of his son’s success is enough. Ray is the disapproving parent who doesn’t see the fame and fortune only sees the son who has every opportunity but who can’t get out from under a drug dependency. IT is not only Patrick’s performance that is so astounding but the way that his presence changes the performance of the other actors. Ray Cash is like your least favorite relative who sucks all of the fun out of a holiday by their mere presence. Patrick’s best scene is where he causes a rift with his son at Thanksgiving dinner and destroys the thin veil of health and wholeness that John is using to cover his ongoing problems.

One thing that astonishes is that, as is shown in many films, Cash creates a hit single and he is put onto a tour. These tours come up in many films of the 50s and 60s like La Bamba and Thank Thing You Do, but I can’t imagine going to these shows in little towns like Texarkana or Tyler Texas and seeing a lineup that features Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, June Carter, Roy Orbison, and a guy named Elvis Presley. I’m sure such things went around or they wouldn’t make it into so many music films but still. These days it is called a festival, they play only the largest cities, and tickets are fifty dollars and up; and there are half as many big names. But putting so many legends together in one car seems like such a gamble by the label. This is probably something that executives did not think about until after the infamous plane crash that killed Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper. Regardless, it gives the film not only the character interaction and the story it needs but also nostalgia for a time when singers were sent out on the road by themselves instead of with an entourage of personal assistants, record execs, and lifestyle coaches.

What is perhaps surprising is how easily Cash’s life fits into the Hollywood biopic mold. Though one would think that the plot has been spiced up of Hollywood-ized it really hasn’t been. Though it took the screenwriters a number of interviews to establish it, Cash and Carter did have the one night affair in Las Vegas that leads to Cash’s downward spiral. Plus it is well known that Cash proposed to Carter in the middle of a song onstage. It almost seems a clich