James Mangold (2005)
Many scenes are formulaic in the legendary-singer-biopic tradition. There’s the childhood trauma that’s meant to explain most of what happens in later life. There’s the first audition that seems about to end in failure until … There are irreconcilable tensions between fame and family life, drug hell, cold turkey, resurrection as a human being and popular success. (It’s ironic that the whole premise of a biopic is the remarkable individuality of its subject but that the conventions of the genre tend to make famous showbiz lives all seem somehow the same.) Hardly anything surprising happens in this story of the first half of the life of Johnny Cash but it’s wonderfully enjoyable. What distinguishes Walk the Line from similar films is that it has two main characters – and that Cash’s courtship of June Carter is as engaging a part of the story as the progress of his singing career. It happens to be true that, after several failures, he successfully proposed marriage to her while they were singing together onstage in Ontario; in any case, the fact that this is the climax of the film makes perfect emotional and dramatic sense.
Joaquin Phoenix gives a tremendously committed performance as Cash: that you can see the effort it’s taking actually makes it more winning. There are moments when Phoenix’s brooding intensity isn’t particularly expressive but his physicality always is: he uses his body to get into Johnny Cash’s soul and it’s this that gives colour and depth to his singing and, what’s more, allows his performance of the songs to build. He doesn’t sound particularly like the original (and can’t quite get the way that Cash held his guitar) but it doesn’t matter – because Phoenix’s singing voice seems a true expression of the character he’s created and his characterisation of Johnny Cash is convincing. There’s not much resemblance either between June Carter’s gravelly voice and Reese Witherspoon’s more crystalline one – and you accept this for the same reason. Witherspoon gives the film (and Phoenix) a lift as soon as she appears and she sustains this level all the way through. Her June is not only tough, sweet-natured and humorous – this is also a truly brilliant portrait of a woman who understands and uses her public image as a form of protection. Witherspoon is extremely convincing as someone who’s taught herself to keep pain hidden from the world but there are tiny shifts of expression that show the audience the strain of her doing this (as when June, recently divorced, is upbraided for her immoral behaviour by a woman in a store and a tiny frown fractures Witherspoon’s smiling mask). Her singing has terrific verve – you sense the character’s release onstage from the pressures of life offstage, as well as the actress’s delight, in the performance of her duets with Phoenix.
The larger supporting parts suffer worst from the constraints of biopic formula: Ginnifer Goodwin as Cash’s first wife and Robert Patrick, as his father – both of whom the script presents virtually as the villains of the piece – give overemphatic, one-note performances. Some of the actors in smaller roles register more convincingly: Sandra Ellis Lafferty and Dan Beene as June’s parents; Dan John Miller and Larry Bagby as the droll Tennessee Two who accompany Cash; Dallas Roberts, as the Memphis record producer Sam Phillips, who plays the clichéd first audition scene with real intelligence – his face never cracks but his eyes tell you when Cash’s singing has convinced and excited him. And Cash’s concert in Folsom jail – with some amazing faces among the inmates – is certainly the highlight James Mangold wants it to be. The musical director (including coaching of the two principals) was T Bone Burnett.
18 July 2008
