Walk the Line

Starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon

Written by Gill Dennis and James Mangold

Directed by James Mangold

Now that Cash is gone to his reward, who now is the Coolest Man on the Planet? Does someone immediately pick up the robe and crown? If so, who? Willie Nelson? Too crusty. William Shatner? Too kitschy. Christopher Walken? Too weird. Or is finding the next Coolest Man on Earth more like the search for the next Dalai Lama, with disciples of cool searching the preschools for Cash’s reincarnated persona— a young boy dressed in black, popping M&Ms non-stop and wearing a toy guitar slung across back who mysteriously knows all the words to “Delia’s Gone?”

Walking into Walk the Line, James Mangold’s excellent new Cash biopic, I hoped for an epic, Gandhi-like treatment of how a humble Arkansas farmer’s son transformed himself into The Coolest Man on the Planet. Cash is a mythic figure, after all, and the film’s one-sheet poster seemed to promise what I hoped to see— the poster showed Cash literally walking into Hellfire and damnation, but also looking back over his shoulder, toward his last shot at redemption.

What I got, however, was something else entirely. For Walk the Line isn’t about the legend of Johnny Cash at all— it’s a love story. It’s the tale of a man forced to walk through that Hellfire to prove himself worthy of the woman he loves more than his own life and career. As such, it’s not exactly the Johnny Cash movie I wanted. But it’s still damn good, and it taught me a thing or two. I’d like to think Cash would be proud of it.

After an in medias res opening at Folsom Prison, where Cash is about to walk onstage to give the most legendary performance of his career, Walk the Line gives us the standard biopic stuff: young J.R. Cash listens to the Carter Family on the radio, suffers the death of his older brother and the wrath of an unloving father, joins the Air Force, gets married to a cartoon shrew of a wife and arranges his first fateful meeting with Sun Records owner Sam Phillips. These scenes are necessary, perhaps, but not as compelling as you’d like them to be; the characters are mostly stock, and Phoenix’s Cash is a flat cipher.

But when the adult Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) bumps into his childhood idol June Carter (Reese Witherspoon) backstage at the Grand Ole Opry— watch out. Much has been made of the narrative similarities between Walk the Line and last year’s Ray— both are about legendary but drug-addicted musicians who lost brothers, blah-blah-blah. That’s the lazy critic’s approach (although, since Elvis was yet another legendary but drug-addicted musician who lost a brother— his stillborn twin— there seems to be a common narrative in the lives of musicians who came of age in the 1950s). The comparison is apt, up to a point. When boy meets girl, however, the film enters an otherworldly, mythological realm in which Johnny chases June like Zeus racing through the heavens after Asteria. The film revolves around a simple question of earth-shaking importance: will June accept Johnny’s undying devotion?

Thus the heart of the film. Cash begins taking amphetamines in the 1950’s— following Elvis’s lead, of course— to help him through a grueling touring schedule, and then starts taking barbiturates to help him come down at night. June tours with him, suffers through two bad divorces of her own and wrestles with hitching her wagon to Cash’s star even as he applies relentless pressure on her to give up the booty. Before their passing, both Cash and Carter participated in the screenplay’s development, and it benefits from their wish that the film portray them warts-and-all. Cash is by turns arrogant and needy; each time June rejects him, he descends back into his deep well of self-pity filled with pills and booze. June, meanwhile, suffers through self-esteem issues that leave her feeling unworthy of a good man’s love. We even see the heretofore-unrevealed detail of the first night they slept together— while both were still married.

The picture is helped immeasurably, of course, by Mangold’s choices for the leads. As astounding as Jamie Foxx was as Ray Charles, Phoenix one-ups him by doing his own singing. Going in, this worried me immensely— Cash’s voice is so iconic that I feared the film would veer into camp. While Phoenix sounds nothing like Cash, the vibe he projects is so right-on that after his first number I never thought about it again. Meanwhile, Witherspoon radiates such natural Southern-belle charm that it’s easy to see why Johnny would fall for her. And her own singing voice ain’t too bad, either.

If the film falls short of greatness, it’s because of the script’s reliance on off-the-shelf details. There aren’t many scenes in the film that we haven’t seen in other biopics. It doesn’t give much of a sense of how a poor sharecropper’s son can transform himself into a legend. Cash’s music is given short shrift. And while it correctly uses the 1968 Folsom Prison concert as a focal point of Cash’s life, it never explains why it was so important— it was the moment when a cranky, pill-popping country crooner officially became the Man in Black.

But what the film does, it does well. There’s a subtext present that shows just how well Mangold and Gill Dennis get Johnny Cash. In a subdued but climactic scene, Cash lies in bed after a cold-turkey drug withdrawal and lays bare to June his feelings of utter failure as a man. June listens, doesn’t judge, and then reminds him never to forget that he’s a good man who just made a few mistakes. In other words, Cash is a sinner. The scene shows us Johnny confessing his sins to God, with June serving as confessor, and being born again.

That’s what Johnny Cash really saw in June Carter— he saw God’s love. His realization that God loved him despite his sins made Cash the coolest man on the planet. Walk the Line understands this truth, and that’s why it mostly rocks. It tells us that maybe, instead of wasting our time searching for the next Coolest Man or Woman on the Planet, we should spend the rest of our lives trying to become that person ourselves.

November 29, 2005
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