Walk the Line (2-Disc Collector’s Edition)
A solid and entertaining biopic, Walk the Line works less as a movie than an actors’ showcase for its stars. Joaquin Phoenix’s total immersion into the skin of singer Johnny Cash is startling–watching it, you can’t believe this is the same guy who whined about being “vexed” in Gladiator. As he evolves from a farm boy to gospel croonin’ plunker to the Man in Black, Phoenix disappears into Cash’s deep baritone, his way of slinging the guitar onto his back, and his hunched-up style of strumming. But it’s more than just picking up mannerisms: Phoenix also sings as Johnny Cash, and it’s quite impressive.
The story of how Johnny Cash became Johnny Cash traces from his childhood under a distant father (Robert Patrick) to his early attempts at a music career, during which he married his girlfriend Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin). During a tour with the likes of Elvis (Tyler Hilton) and Jerry Lee Lewis (Waylon Malloy Payne), he encounters singer June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), and his love for her–and her rejection of him through the years–spurs him into drugs, drinking, and depression. As with most movies based on real-life singers, as his popularity grows, the women come a-flockin’, and the childhood demons surface. Witherspoon, who matches Phoenix drawl for drawl, plays June both as a sassy spitfire whose charm breaks your heart, and as a sympathetic friend who tries to help Cash get over–well, her. The love story is what endures, but the movie comes most alive during its musical numbers, and even if you’re not a country fan, it may just get you to run out and buy a Johnny Cash album.
Reviews
Hmmm. Doesn’t look like Nancy and Lee
Reviewer: Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA)
In WALK THE LINE, Joaquin Phoenix shows that he’s come a long way since his role as the crazy Caesar in GLADIATOR.
Those going into WALK THE LINE thinking it’s a comprehensive film bio of Johnny Cash may perhaps come out slightly disappointed. While there’s a relative brief sequence of his early years growing up on an Arkansas cotton farm, an even briefer sequence of his time in the Air Force in the early 50s, the film really begins in 1955 when, failing as a door-to-door salesman and wannabe gospel singer, he cuts a rock ‘n’ roll record for Sun Studios in Memphis and his career as a CW crooner takes off. The film ends with his marriage to June Carter in 1968. In between, against the backdrop of early hits, it focuses on his failed marriage to first wife Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin), his self-destructive abuse of amphetamines, and rocky relationship with singer/actress Carter (Reese Witherspoon), a twice-divorced single mother of two.
The real treat of WALK THE LINE is watching Phoenix and Witherspoon amaze with Oscar-caliber dramatic performances. Who would have suspected that the latter was capable of anything other than light comedy?
In case you haven’t seen the film and you’re wondering, Phoenix and Witherspoon themselves sing the Cash/Carter material; they’re surprisingly effective. Mind you, I’ve never been such a Cash fan that I’ve possessed any of his albums, and I’ve only previously downloaded one of his songs (”City of New Orleans”). Indeed, when Phoenix and Witherspoon recreate the Cash/Carter duet of “Jackson”, my first thought was: Didn’t Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood do that?
Coming out of the screening, my wife remarked that Phoenix sounded very much like Johnny himself. My response was a non-committal but prudent “Mmmm”. Back home at the computer, I downloaded a couple more Cash songs, including his “Jackson” duet with Carter. To my ears, the real Cash had a singing voice that was slightly hoarser, and with a more pronounced slow drawl than Joaquin’s version. While that doesn’t detract from the actor’s performance, it may cause purists to grumble.
The film’s opening scene is of two guards on a tower at Folsom Prison listening to the bass “thump, thump, thump” washing over the prison yard from the hall in which Cash is about to perform his famous concert before the inmates. My wife and I were sitting in the front row of the studio screening theater and the sound reverberated through our bones. I knew then that WALK THE LINE was going to be an exceptional film.
It’s because you’re mine…
Reviewer: MICHAEL ACUNA (Glendale, California United States)
Movie biopics are generally problematic: how do you get all or a major portion of a person’s life on the screen in more or less than 2 hours? How do you do justice to anyone’s life in 120 minutes?
There have been good examples of course, but most of them have been good because the writer or director has wisely chosen to telescope/hone in on a relatively short portion of a subject’s life: Billie Holiday’s in “Lady Sings the Blues” or Truman Capote’s in “Capote.” Both films, I realize with wildly different results, but both equally effective because the focus of each has been telescoped and better stated…microscoped onto a short portion of each life: both Truman Capote and Billie Holiday have been revealed and analyzed and effectively appreciated through the learned and discretionary eye of someone who effectively separates the legend from the reality.
Director James Mangold (the quirky “Heavy” and the effective “The Yards”) would not seem a logical choice to direct a probing film about Johnny Cash (an audaciously effective Joaquin Phoenix) and June Carter ( a wonderful Reese Witherspoon) but he does manage most of the time to steer away from the maudlin and melodramatic and in the process comes up with a good, straight-forward biopic of the two.
The obvious comparison to “Walk The Line” would be the recent “Ray” but whereas Jamie Foxx’s recreation of Ray Charles borders on caricature and mimicry, Phoenix’s Cash always seems and feels organic: he doesn’t so much as inhabit Cash’s spirit and persona as interpret it. Phoenix not only uses his own voice to sing the songs…he uses his own psychic voice to creep inside of Cash to reveal the Cash inside of Phoenix and the Phoenix inside of Cash and this translates into a thrilling, revealing portrait of the two.
Witherspoon also does her own singing and because we know a lot less of Carter’s life, manufactures and makes real a character that is both simple and straightforward as well as one who, though she loves and admires her talented and famous family, longs for her own place in the world in general and in the entertainment world specifically: she is less wounded than Cash but equally on the lookout for personal and professional validation.
“Walk The Line” is not the best movie ever made but it certainly is not the worst. The best biopics require strong, incandescent performances at their core and “WTL”has that in spades with Phoenix and Witherspoon’s revolutionary recreations/interpretations of Cash and Carter.
Enter the world of “Walk The Line” with an open mind and heart and you will be rewarded with both a noble and novel interpretation of two lives and two people who dared to be talented and blessed in a world that often attempted to stamp out and diffuse those that were different in favor of mediocrity.
You must have to be a fan
Reviewer: bookloversfriend (United States)
I can’t figure out the reviews of this movie, except that the reviewers must be fans of Johnny Cash. That’s okay. But people who are not fans need to be warned: this movie is NOT for you. Even if you’re a fan of Reese, beware. During the thin slices when she’s on camera, she’s good as always, but the slices, though many, are very brief.
The brief sequence of the young boys in the beginning is good, too. Hence, the two stars.
The problem with this movie is that it’s repetitive. He sings a song. He stumbles around in a drunken/drugged rage. He sings another song. He stumbles around in a spaced-out rage. He sings another song. He rages. He sings another song. He rages. You get the picture. Once would have been enough. We get it. Now, let’s see some more story. This goes on for over two hours!
Incidentally, if you want to know what the real June Carter and Cash sound like, the song at the end while the credits are passing is sung by them, themselves. Reese and What’s-his-name do a passable job at impersonating, but it doesn’t get to you. Hearing the real thing, you can see why he was so popular among some people.
Add comment January 1st, 2007
