WALK
THE LINE: JOAQUIN MAINTAINS HIS BALANCE
By
Erica Hector Vital
Red Rock Review
ericavital@cox.net
ericav@theflickchicks.com
As a
child of the seventies I remember all too well staying up late Saturday
nights for the Johnny Cash and Friends hour just to see the country legend
in all his craggy rebellion step up to the mike and say, “Hello, I’m Johnny
Cash.” Needless to say, Johnny and I have a history. Something in the
depth of the voice and in the somber sexuality of the shaggy dark hair and
soulful eyes appealed to my seven year-old sense of the romantic and I
pledged my soul to country rebels with experience on their faces and Jack
Daniels in their grins. Joaquin Phoenix who is becoming a legend in his own
right with such roles as the courageous Lucius Hunt in M. Night Shyamalan's
The Village (2004) and the patricidal young emperor Commodus opposite
Russell Crowe in Gladiator (2001), uses his slightly off-kilter good
looks and formidable passion to recreate the myth and sexy pathos of Johnny
Cash in the recently released Walk the Line.
Director
James Mangold begins with music, just a thread of Folsom Prison Blues
pulsing over the guard tower during Cash’s 1968 performance. The chords are
percussive and the thread of Cash’s unforgettable rhythm becomes a torrent
we follow into Folsom itself and onto the prison stage where Cash’s band,
The Highwaymen, are sustaining the beat, guitar and bass pumping through a
crowd of outlaws and bad men, perpetrators of the kinds of crimes of passion
that are recurring themes in much of Cash’s music. In a skillful display of
storytelling, Mangold who directed Stallone in the sleeper hit Cop Land
(1997) and Anglelina Jolie and Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted
(1999), does not immediately give us Joaquin or Cash. Instead the surging
bass line speaks for the man who, while waiting backstage, is lost in
thought—confronted with memories of his tragic past even as he faces the
future.
In this way, screenwriter Gill Dennis
begins at the middle of Cash’s career, years after the Arkansas
singer-songwriter born of farming folk has ascended the ranks of Nashville
to become a musical outlaw. And the middle is the place to start, for the
life of Johnny Cash was such a blend of music and myth, legend and power,
compassion and aggression that fans would expect nothing less than the
delivery of the standard tales and raucous rumors they have come to
associate with the man and his legend.
Cash, for all his woebegone, folk and
God loving humanity, was a hell-raiser. He was a drinker, a womanizer, a
drug user, and at those times when he crossed the border into Mexico to
score amphetamines, a societal dropout. Walk the Line delivers these
seedier, sadder beats of Cash’s life, but ultimately the film, based on
Cash’s 1975 autobiography Man In Black, and the 1997Cash: The
Autobiography, is about redemption.
When a feverish Joaquin as Johnny
emerges from the torment of withdrawal to find Reese Witherspoon, as June
Carter, hovering over him and he whispers, “You’re an angel,” we believe
him. But what makes this moment more appealing in life and in film is that
June, delivered with a dedicated honesty by Reese, is passionately flawed
enough to admit, “No, I’m far from it.”
The love affair and enduring marriage
with country performer June Carter are as much a part of Cash’s legend as
his genius, and Reese Witherspoon in the role of the talented and forthright
June Carter brings life and dimension to the role. Having made a film
franchise of the terminally upbeat Elle of Legally Blonde,
Witherspoon is more often than not slated for roles of fashionable angst and
naïveté. Her lean look and wide-eyed grace are easily associated with a
certain social or aesthetic hierarchy in which her characters reign. In
some ways her June Carter fits this pattern. Carter was a Nashville
darling whose family was respected on the Gospel circuit as well as in
Nashville. June built a respectable solo career but departed from the
strict Bible Belt roots by a series of marriages and scandal driven divorces
before Johnny. The attraction between these two talents, Carter and Cash,
comes together with Joaquin and Reese. What seems an incongruous pairing
is natural onscreen.
There is an exchange of energy and
downright magnetism that is especially riveting in Walk the Line’s
musical scenes. Singing in their own voices as they portray John and June,
Reese and Joaquin take the stage with an affable force that turns biopic
into concert event.
The portrayal of Cash’s first marriage
to wife Vivian soured Cash’s daughters towards the film. Ginnifer Goodwin as
Johnny’s wife fills the role with a delightful scorn and music fans will
delight in portrayals of Jerry Lee Lewis by Waylon Paine, young Elvis (Tyler
Hilton), and Waylon Jennings (Shooter Jennings). The film is a tribute to
Cash’s power, his meaning beyond pop or country as a troubadour, a road
prophet that could stir the dark seeds of what was and what is in the soul
of men overcome by their passions. He was speaking to those men in Folsom.
Speaking to the desire for life and the fear of death, and the triumph
between hellraising and redemption. Cash was living the life of his music.
And Joaquin Phoenix has made me fall in love with the Man in Black all over
again.
A classic concert romance.
