Walk The Line
I Don’t Like It, But I Guess Things Happen That Way
The biggest disappointment about Walk The Line has, oddly, little to do with Joaquin Phoenix. It is that the movie seems composed of scenes from different movies, all of which could have been better than what we get. Could you make a movie about Johnny Cash’s hardscrabble childhood in Arkansas, growing up with a doomed brother, a hard-drinking father and a hymnal? Sure you could, and I’d buy a ticket. Could you make a movie about young Johnny Cash in the Air Force in Germany, drinking beer, writing songs, and learning to be a man? Probably easy enough, I think. Could you make a movie about Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis tearing up the South on a Sun Records tour? Oh, yeah, especially if you gave equal time to all the principals. Could you make a movie that was just a recreation of the Johnny Cash concert at Folsom Prison? It would be a stretch, but I’d be there, sure enough.
Walk The Line is all of these movies, at least for a few minutes, but you can’t help but think that you might rather spend time in some of those other movies instead. It is an incredibly well-made and evocative film, showing the details of its period with remarkable fidelity. Musical director T Bone Burnett has done an admirable job of making the music sound as authentic as possible, even given the obvious limitations of the Hollywood talent he was given to work with. At least in places, Walk The Line is an attractive, memorable picture, but it never manages to coalesce.
In fact, there’s just one moment — one historical turning point — where Walk The Line comes into its own and becomes the movie that it wants to be. It’s that magical moment when John Cash from Arkansas and the Air Force becomes Johnny Cash, recording artist, right in the recording studio of Sun Records in Memphis — when he’s goaded into it by Sam Phillips (Dallas Roberts). It’s a scene that works because of Phoenix’s essential awkwardness and lack of charisma. He starts the scene out fumbling with a tired old gospel song, and then trots out “Folsom Prison Blues”, painfully at first, and then with greater assurance and authority, to where it’s recognizable at the end.
Everything else in Walk The Line has been building up to that moment, and the rest of the movie ought to be a build-up to another moment, where that young Johnny Cash becomes the Man in Black, where he gains full control over his powers and becomes an instrument to spread truth, goodness, and redemption across the land. But that never quite happens. Although the movie leads us through tours and pills and discord of every type, with Burnett’s mimicry of Cash’s music running through every other scene, it never quite crystallizes, never quite grows out of that awkwardness.
This is mostly Joaquin Phoenix’s fault.
I don’t like Joaquin Phoenix. I am on record for that. I have never liked any role of his that he’s ever played, except as the Everyman firefighter in Ladder 49. In that part, he was a clumsy but heroic goofus, and the part fit him splendidly in a way that Johnny Cash’s black jacket can’t. When he’s on stage, Phoenix is all herky-jerky, with angles and elbows everywhere. I kept thinking that Phoenix looked a lot like Vincent D’Onofrio, in Men in Black, in those scenes where he had a giant cockroach living inside his body. Walk The Line may be making the point that Cash wasn’t yet comfortable in his own skin in the Sixties, and if that’s what it’s trying to do, then it achieves that, at least by accident.
Of course, Phoenix can’t sing like Cash. It’s hard to think that anyone could, even though Cash was really no virtuoso. That Phoenix even approximates it is a minor miracle, and the resulting sound is… well… not horrible. (Although I did listen to a clip of the soundtrack on XM 27, the movie soundtrack channel, and it was simply awful, with Cash’s gravelly baritone reduced to a confused mutter.) Reese Witherspoon isn’t much better, really, but she did learn how to play the autoharp, which is more than Phoenix did. (Rich Lowry pointed this out on NRO’s blog the other day; Phoenix never moves his left hand to play different notes.)
Having said all that, Walk The Line is a solid flick, much better than last year’s very similar Ray. It’s certainly worth seeing, especially for those people who have no idea who Johnny Cash was and why he was so important. (By this I mean the people who choose playlist for country radio stations, really, you people should be ashamed of yourselves.) As bad as Phoenix was for this part, he wasn’t terrible, and there could have been a lot worse choices out there. (You have no idea how painful it was to write that.) And I would rather much have a good Johnny Cash movie be made than have the perfect Johnny Cash movie never be made.
So I am not telling anybody not to see Walk The Line, and since I live in New Jersey, amongst Yankees, I am going to talk about it in a positive way. People should see the film, and learn, and maybe go out on iTunes and buy some songs. But I wish that some things were different. I wish there was more time to explore some of the side roads in the movie, like Johnny’s relationships with Elvis, and Dylan, and the Highwaymen. (There’s an all-too-brief scene of Cash and Waylon Jennings sharing a tiny apartment in Nashville, for example.) I wish there was more time to explore the Carter Family and explain their role in creating modern country music. I wish Walk The Line didn’t quite gloss over the role that Cash’s Christianity played in his recovery, and in his decision to play at Folsom Prison. And I wish that the whole movie wasn’t quite as slick and Hollywood as it is.
But given the moviemaking world that we live in, could Walk The Line be better? I don’t know. I can’t say.
I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way.