Movie Review |
Icon Busting: Walk the Lineby M. Faust |
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If it were possible to measure such things, I suspect that the death of Johnny Cash two years ago affected more people than the loss of any other public figure in recent memory. Not necessarily a deep and grievous loss for most, and certainly not a surprise. But certainly an awful lot of us heard the news and felt that someone integral to the character of a tumultuous era was gone, leaving us better for having been here. The intensity of that reaction may have varied, but few would dispute it.
It may be an unfair burden to place on a film, but audiences of the future who watch Walk the Line to learn something about Cash won’t come away with much of an idea of what he meant to us. The result is less comparable to last year’s Ray than to the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire.
I have no doubt that director James Mangold and his co-writer Gill Dennis had anything but the best intentions. They spent years developing the film, and had the cooperation of Cash and his wife June Carter in the last years of their lives. According to the production notes, they helped the writers flesh out the information contained in Cash’s two anecdotal books Man in Black and Cash: The Autobiography.
That may, in fact, have been part of the problem. By all accounts a humble man of great religious faith, Cash may have been wont to downplay his accomplishments to focus on a moral journey in which he was redeemed from sin and despair by finding the love of his life.
Walk the Line begins with one of the defining moments of Cash’s life, the accidental death of his 14-year-old brother Jack, the golden child from whom great things were expected. As Cash’s abusive, alcoholic father puts it, “The Devil took the wrong son.”
From there, the film chugs quickly though Cash’s time in the Air Force, his youthful marriage and attempts to support his family while dreaming of becoming a musician. He gets a chance to audition for Sam Philips, head of Sun Records and the force behind Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins, all of whom become Cash’s companions in an endless tour of southern roadhouses and high school gyms. He begins to pop amphetamines to get him through the grind and the loneliness. And he meets June Carter, part of a showbiz family that have been country stars since Cash was a boy listening to the radio.
So far so good. Walk the Line takes pains to recreate the excitement of live performances from soon-to-be-famous performers working under trying conditions: all of the actors playing musicians and singers did their own singing and playing, and while they don’t always sound exactly like the originals it’s more important to get the atmosphere correct.
But after this early point the film loses interest in Cash’s developing artistry to concentrate on his relationship with Carter. (The two performed together for ten years, through various marriages and Cash’s drug addiction, before getting married in 1968.) There’s nothing of Cash’s growing interest in social causes, his research into Indian affairs and his attempts to bring the progressivism of early ’60s folk music to conservative Nashville. That Cash doesn’t fit into the simpleminded plot arc that decrees he must be Saved By Love, and so the movie gives us a singer who seems to have no connection to his music other than getting on stage and doing the hits.
(Even Cash’s famous 1968 show at Folsom Prison is presented as a risky career move, when in fact he had been doing free shows at prisons since 1958.)
The blame falls more on Mangold, a generally mediocre director, than actor Joaquin Phoenix, who has the daunting task of portraying such an iconic figure. He and Mangold know better than to have him try to impersonate Cash too directly, and instead aim for the essence. He’s best in the performance sequences, though they may seem amped up to audiences who recall only the more sedate older Cash and not the younger rockabilly star.
Still, while I can’t think of anyone who would have been better cast in the role, Phoenix is a bit lacking. He looks soulful but lacks the downtrodden appearance that made many of Cash’s fans believe he knew about prison life from firsthand experience. (He didn’t, despite various overnight jail lockups for hellraising.) Too often he comes across as merely petulant instead of tormented.
(Personally, Phoenix has always reminded me of Vincent Gallo, which lent an unintended resonance to the scene in which Cash tries to impress his uncaring father at Thanksgiving dinner.)
U2’s Bono once remarked that “Every man knows he is a sissy compared to Johnny Cash.” Walk the Line almost seems to be trying to counter that, to be depicting Cash as a man who was less than his fans took him to be. That may be a useful portrait to his longtime fans; it may even have been a debunking that the real Cash desired. Still, for those without an initial appreciation of him, the film is a disservice.
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