Walk the Line
Review by Carolyn Arends | posted 11/18/2005
 1 of 5
Music legend Johnny Cash is the only artist to be inducted into the Country Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Songwriter's Hall of Fame. He is almost certainly the only entertainer nearly disemboweled by an ostrich. And he is also the only person ever to be sued by the federal government for starting a forest fire. (The exhaust on his camper ignited, leading to Cash's infamous defense: "I didn't start the fire, my truck did, and it's dead now.") Walk the Line, the terrific new film chronicling the first half of Cash's life and career, does not mention the ostrich or forest fire incidents. It does an outstanding job, however, of telling many of the other great stories of Cash's life.
How does the son of an Arkansas cotton farmer become a complex and iconoclastic artist, influencing virtually every genre of popular music in the process? How does he manage to wind up as both one of country music's greatest rebels and one of the Christian faith's most authentic evangelists? What happens when two people (Cash and fellow performer June Carter) share a powerful connection but, for the first decade of their relationship, can only be alone together on a concert stage? Walk the Line director and co-screenwriter James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted, Cop Land) mines two autobiographies (1986's The Man in Black and 1997's Cash: The Autobiography) and seven years of conversation and consultation with Johnny and June Carter Cash in order to explore these questions. The resulting film is engaging for all 136 of its minutes, and crackles with enough musical and emotional sparks to ignite another Cash forest fire.
Walk the Line begins (and eventually ends) at Cash's landmark 1968 Folsom Prison concert and live recording, but within a few frames we are transported to 1944 Dyess, Arkansas. Twelve-year-old J.R. (Johnny's nickname as a kid) and his older brother Jack work hard picking cotton for their humorless and sometimes menacing father (an effectively despicable Robert Patrick), but that doesn't stop them from enjoying fishing, music and each other. J.R. is particularly passionate about music, an inclination his mother (played with appropriate understatement by edgy country artist Shelby Lynn) nurtures and his father demeans, and he wonders why he can't be a better Bible scholar like his "good" brother Jack. When Jack is killed in a tragic accident, J.R.'s enormous grief is compounded by his father's cruelty ("The devil did this and he took the wrong son") and his sorrow becomes the soil for fruit both good (an achingly authentic artistry) and bad (self-destructive patterns of addiction and impulsiveness).
The next scenes introduce Joaquin Phoenix (Ladder 49, Signs) as Cash, and the casting is brilliant. Phoenix gets Cash's curious mix of "chip-on-shoulder/heart-on-sleeve" so right that after only a few minutes I had abandoned comparing him physically to the real Cash and started to forget that he was only the actor portraying him. Even more impressive than Phoenix's acting is, surprisingly, his singing. He nails the vocals, even managing to find Cash's gruff signature bray, and does a great job depicting the developing confidence of the young Cash from a faltering country boy to a guitar-slinging outlaw.
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