For any veteran viewer of American
cinema, the new Johnny Cash biopic, Walk
the Line, raises some serious questions about the relationships between
life and art, and which one really imitates the other. According to the movies,
all famous singers and musicians undergo pretty much the same troubles and
travails on their journey to fame and fortune, which makes most biographies
look very much alike. Must the career of a musical artist always follow the
same pattern, do the artists model their lives on films, or do the movies
simply copy each other?
Whatever its historical accuracy, and
whether art imitates life or life imitates art, or most likely, art imitates
art, Walk the Line resembles a
hundred other movies of its kind. It chronicles, in its fashion, the career of
the legendary singer from his childhood in rural Arkansas to a point of triumph
and happiness in 1968, then provides a brief prose summary of the next 35 years
until his death in 2003. It mostly concentrates on a number of important
moments in his career from the 1950s and ’60s, when his great success, in the
comforting, time honored fashion, led him to great unhappiness and the familiar
pitfalls of drug addiction and alcoholism.
The movie travels a familiar path,
showing the young Johnny oppressed by a drunken father who prefers his older
brother, tragically killed in a terrible accident; the singer’s remorse and
resentment partially account for his later problems with success. In a
characteristic series of narrative jumps, it then shows the grown man (now
played by Joaquin Phoenix) taking up the guitar and composing lyrics while in
the Air Force in Germany, then, inexplicably, suddenly proposing over the
telephone to a young woman back home, who has never appeared until that moment.
By the next jump, he’s married, a father, and an unsuccessful door-to-door
salesman in Memphis, Tennessee.
Walk
the Line hits its stride when Cash and his group audition for Sam Phillips
of Sun Records, who dismisses his awful gospel songs, but also in a sense
reveals to the young singer the right direction for his talent. Once he makes
his first record and embarks on a tour with such rock and roll pioneers as
Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley, success apparently comes more easily than
usual in the movies. On the tour, with a kind of inevitability, he also finally
meets June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), of the famous Carter Family, whose music
he has followed since childhood, and, of course, he falls in love.
The bumpy course of the relationship
between Cash and Carter supplies the emotional center of the movie, as they
struggle through their marriages and divorces and his increasing dependence on
booze and pills. She fends him off for what seems like years, while he sinks
into increasingly self-destructive behaviors, finally drying him out and
apparently — in a most perfunctory scene — bringing him to the Baptist
Church. (Like movie stars who check into the Betty Ford Clinic, country singers
with personal and professional problems generally record some gospel songs, though
Walk the Line neglects most of that
aspect of Cash’s career.)
Although the plot, presumably true to
the singer’s life, tends to repeat itself, the songs and the performances
create and sustain most of the energy of Walk
the Line. Joaquin Phoenix quite remarkably imitates the look, the posture,
the walk, and above all, that deep, dark voice — he sounds good enough to
embark on his own tour — and the movie comes wonderfully alive when Johnny
Cash strides on to the stage, introduces himself, and just takes off into those
wonderful songs, so far superior to the usual laments about honky tonks and
cheating hearts.
The soppy, tiresome love story
unfortunately slows down the narrative and weakens the considerable force of
Johnny Cash’s personality in Walk the
Line. Reese Witherspoon deserves much of the blame for those problems; she
plays June Carter with all the perkiness of a cheerleader, diminishing Carter’s
own terrific talent and presence. The picture’s emotional relationship,
unfortunately, cannot match the power of its musical duet, suggesting once
again that if art imitates life, it also outlasts love.
Walk the Line, directed by James Mangold, is playing at
Canandaigua Theatres, Culver Ridge 16, Greece Ridge 12, Henrietta 18, Pittsford
Cinema, Tinseltown
This article appears in Nov 23-29, 2005.
