MOVIE REVIEW 'Walk the Line' is love story
The film portrays the fierce commitment between Johnny and June Cash.
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
KANSAS CITY STAR
Instead of choosing a routine musician biography, the makers of the Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line" have zeroed in on the thing in his life that Cash was proudest of.
"Walk the Line" is above all else a love story.
Among show-biz marriages, that of country superstar Cash and country princess June Carter is legendary. Married in 1968, theirs was fiercely committed relationship that ended only with their deaths within months of each other in 2003.
But getting them married ... that was a long, hard haul. And that's what director James Mangold and co-write Gill Dennis focus on here.
Oh, the movie tells us about Cash's boyhood, early career and first marriage. But as far as they're concerned the Man in Black only started living when he met June Carter, a member of country music's First Family, and glimpsed what might be.
Mangold is an able if not inspired filmmaker ("Cop Land," "Girl Interrupted," "Kate & amp; Leopold") who here gets a huge boost from his stars, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon.
Phoenix doesn't look like Cash, but his acting chops more than compensate. Unlike Jamie Foxx's uncanny impersonation of Ray Charles in "Ray," Phoenix's performance is more of an interior journey that slowly grows on us. The familiar Cash persona emerges slowly over time, assembling the personality with which he would face the world.
Phoenix doesn't over-emote. Ninety percent of his performance comes through his eyes. But those eyes do a lot of talking.
And by the end of the film the similarities generate goosebumps. The transformation is complete.
Singing for himself
Moreover, Phoenix does his own singing and while he can't precisely duplicate the resonant growl-from-the-chest power of Cash's vocals, he comes close. He's very good.
As June, Witherspoon is great, providing the film precisely what it requires.
Witherspoon may have had the easier job, since June wasn't nearly the iconic figure Johnny was. A child of the famous Carter family, she developed a stage act as the mini Minnie Pearl, playing a sassy, perky country gal with a down-home sense of humor. She created the role to compensate for what she believed to be her limited vocal abilities.
For a decade beginning in the mid-'50s, Cash and Carter toured together with Sun Studio shows, sharing stages and busses with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison. Their mutual attraction was obvious, but for much of that time they were married to other people. Moreover, June's bedrock Christianity didn't allow any wiggle room for hanky panky with a notorious bad boy like Johnny (although her inner turmoil was all too clear in "Ring of Fire," the tune she wrote which became Cash's signature song).
June repeatedly rebuffed Johnny's desperate advances -- even after they spent one solitary night together. The film suggests that Johnny's disappointment with their relationship was an element in his pill-popping habit that came close to destroying his career and his life.
Getting bogged down
At this point "Walk the Line" comes close to bogging down, with our protagonist locked in a destructive cycle of professions of love, rejection and substance abuse. It gets tiresome. But Witherspoon saves the day, making June such a strong, desirable presence that we understand Cash's yearnings.
Even so, the film feels overlong.
"Walk the Line" is a two-character effort. Among the supporting players only Robert Patrick, as Cash's rawboned, disapproving farmer father, really registers. As Cash's first wife, Ginnifer Goodwin has been reduced to blandness. The filmmakers obviously didn't want to trash the first Mrs. Cash.
The film's production values are adequate, but the staging of the musical numbers is good, capturing the immediacy of rock's early days and the nice fat comfort zone in which most country music existed. The film's musical highlight is a recreation of the famous 1968 concert at Folsom Prison, in which Cash played his guts out to an audience who felt he was one of their own.
And he might very well have become one of them, if not for the love of a good woman.