A celebration of young love

Film review: Walk the Line

Translating the lives of music stars into film is a huge challenge for any director and this holds true whether the subject is Mozart (Amadeus) or Patsy Cline (Sweet Dreams). Milk the unfortunate events and you get a tearjerking melodrama. Tone it down and you lose the essence of the remarkable persona that made the legend. Hit a happy middle ground and you end up with a mediocre product, a sort of VH-1 Behind the Music documentary.

There are other problems. The prerequisites stay the same. The characters must include managers, producers, women, rivals, etc. There must be performing shots, travel footage and the inspiring montage of how they rose to fame. Worse of all, there is the temptation to use a lot of the music, which must be great or nobody would have been interested in making the movie. But there is also the danger of coming up with an extended music video. Nice to watch, but boring after a while.

Director James Mangold did take on a daunting task when he decided to take on the story of Johnny Cash with Walk the Line. Born to a poor family in Arkansas in 1935, J.R. Cash seemed doomed to follow in the footsteps of his father as a struggling cotton farmer. But later events changed that. The death of a favored older brother alienated him from his Dad. He said God took the wrong son. He fell in love with music, all sorts of them. And later while stationed in Germany, he saw the movie Inside the Walls of Folsom. Out of that came the inspiration to write the song Folsom Prison Blues, which would become his biggest success.

What follows is pretty much standard fare in such biopics. Easy, except that Mangold also has to contend with the inevitability that Walk the Line would be compared to Ray, the much-acclaimed biopic about music legend Ray Charles. Truth to tell, there are so many similarities in the lives of these two men. Charles and Cash both had an impoverished childhood. They unfairly blamed themselves on the death of a brother. They spent time in jail. They grappled with addiction: Charles on heroin and Cash on prescription drugs. Then, in true storybook fashion, they won over their demons and went on to greater fame.

But while Taylor Hackford of Ray effectively combined human drama with an incisive look into the music of Ray Charles, Mangold took on a different route. He focused on the love story of Cash and his wife June Carter. Cash grew up listening to the music of the Carter Family and was already star struck even before he first laid eyes on the pretty and perky June. They were married to other people then and coping with personal problems, so love had to wait for some years. But when it finally happened, theirs became one of the most moving romances of all time. In fact, when June died in May 2003, Johnny followed in September, barely three months later.

Mangold’s tale does not go that far. He ends Walk the Line during Cash’s landmark performance in Folsom Prison, that was later released as a live recording. He keeps Johnny and June, young and strong and the love they shared, forever magical. It is here that we find the film’s biggest assets, the dead-on performances by Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June.

Larger than life is a description that truly applies to Johnny Cash and Phoenix rose up to the remarkable heights called for by the role. The dark penetrating gaze, the tension on his body as he performs and the swagger that masks the despair are all there. Reese is no different. June divided her life between being a star and a determined woman and it is such a joy to watch Reese move from one to the other with ease. Their scenes together, whether singing on stage or in acerbic banter, display the kind of chemistry associated with great motion picture romances.

Come to think of it, although Jamie Foxx was certainly impressive as Ray Charles, he merely lip-synched through the original recordings. Not Joaquin and Reese, who do their own singing in Walk the Line. Mangold took a big gamble when he decided on this but all three of them came out big winners. I am not familiar with the recordings of June Carter so I take Reese’s vocals as it is, vibrant and sexy like most country music divas. Joaquin though is something else. He got Cash down pat including his snarling low notes. Close your eyes and he sounds like the real thing.