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Sometime in the early Nineties our
curators of cool inducted Johnny Cash into the proto-gangsta
pantheon of Great American Badasses. A ferocious 1970
photo of him flipping a cameraman the bird started
appearing everywhere (I had one in my cubicle next
to an Ice Cube malt-liquor ad), and rap impresario
Rick Rubin began his decade-plus recasting of Cash
as the eternal mystic outlaw—releasing four spare treatments
of that timeless baritone doing songs both old and
postmodern, all skewing to themes of, as one album
title put it, “Love, God, and Murder.”
That’s the Cash aura that infuses the beginning of the latest big-budget treatment
of a music giant, Walk the Line, which opens with an exterior prison
shot and the title “Represa, California, 1968.” The site and date are familiar
to any casual consumer of the Cash myth, and as the camera begins its slow journey
inside—dollying
through empty cells and abandoned corridors—the distant rumble of the event crescendos
with the historical sweep of a Nuremberg doc. Clapping hands and stomping boots
build the peppy two-step onstage to riotous tension as inmates await the Man
in Black’s legendary concert in Folsom Prison, a live album that eventually outsold
The Beatles. In a quiet room offstage, we meet Joaquin Phoenix’s Cash, sitting
with dark eyes fixed on a table saw as a glass of water shakes rhythmically as
if from thuds of an approaching Jurassic Park dinosaur. “Mr. Cash?” a voice
asks as the star absently fingers the blades, lost in a reverie whose flashback
narrative will comprise most of the film: farm boy falls in love with music,
suffers familial deprivations, finds voice, becomes star, gets wasted, wins love,
attains peace. It’s a tidy Hollywood arc imposed on a messy real life, but it
gets the job done.
Since Walk the Line has been in the works for eight years, its arrival
on the heels of Ray isn’t as cynically train-jumping as it might seem, although
both films show the methodology for Great American Voice tales refined to a slick
science. Like Ray’s Taylor Hackford, writer-director James Mangold winds selected
events around sturdy themes like struggle, reconciliation, and redemption in
an effort to evoke a period as much as a person—letting the aqua hues of ’55
Chevys, the fairy-tale scrim of roadside dust, and the vivid blue-black of pompadours
do most of the re-creating, leaving reality to actors and story.
As Ray Charles, Jamie Foxx was simply uncanny, an act of flawless mimicry. Joaquin
Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon hoe their ambitious rows as Cash and June Carter—doing
their own singing, playing, and Southern accents—but the characterizations are
less about mannerisms than emotional storytelling. Witherspoon’s bubbly twang
brings the brassy former child country star and future Mrs. Cash into adorable
reality, while Phoenix’s scarily brooding Goth affect occasionally makes it seem
like he wandered in from a remake of In Cold Blood. His obsidian stare
recalls Eminem in 8 Mile more than any country figure, but you can’t
say it doesn’t fit
the material. As with Ray Charles, a Johnny Cash story without drugs and darkness
is an E! Network biography, not a motion picture. But this film uses Cash’s demons
judiciously, if Oprah-ishly, as tests for a spiritual struggle. Stationed with
the air force in Germany, a lonesome Cash reads an article about Folsom Prison
and is soon sitting in an empty hangar with a guitar, testing out chords and
phrases. “I hear that train a comin’, a comin’ down the line,” he
sings softly. “Killed
a man in Reno. Just to … watch him … die?” Hmmm. The young God-fearing
man smiles at the perverse line that just popped out of his unconscious and will
soon make history. He comes home, wins a record contract, and stumbles through
fame, drugs, infidelity, and self-hatred, along with the sounds and legends of
early rock ’n’ roll—eventually finding that the same shadows that
made his music are threatening his soul. The cozy epilogue—marriage to June and
rapprochement with Dad—soften the tougher-minded central story, which is about
a man who won the hearts of America by portraying its rejected. Few genres give
you as much bang for your buck as the musical-legend biopic, which comes with
blockbuster plot points and no onus of establishing believability, every potentially
mawkish scene validated by the imprimatur of Reality. When the subject is Johnny
Cash, though, myth is almost as important.
© 2005 by Chris Norris
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