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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Walk The Line: The Johnny Cash biopic

  
 
xxsarahxx
11:53 / 26.03.06
i can't find any topics on this already and i just wondered what people thought of the film. personally i can't get enough of it, the cd is awesome too.
 
 
Jack Fear
13:55 / 26.03.06
I think my experience of watching Walk The Line suffered somewhat from having seen it so soon after watching the deeply awful Ray: taken together, the films seem to present a comprehensive picture of drug withdrawal as involving rolling around sweatily in one’s bed for the length of a five-minute montage whilst wearing a sleeveless undershirt, and also to imply that a dead brother (for whose death you blame yourself) is a necessary component of the artistic makeup.

What Walk The Line did successfully was make me think about the craft of acting, about memetics and the Method and the polar extremes of performance. Unlike Ray, it featured actual performances, rather than impersonations. D’you know what I mean? In the latter film, the director chose to use Ray Charles’s original recordings for the soundtrack, and Jamie Foxx’s performance seemed to reflect that—he came off like a nightclub comic doing a celebrity impression, and went no deeper than that.

Now, Johnny Cash is as instantly recognizable a figure as Ray Charles, and Joaquin Phoenix neither looks nor sounds anything like him—but I think that worked to his advantage. Freed of the responsibility or the possibility of imitating Johnny, Phoenix instead created him, an original character named “Johnny Cash.”

And, wheels within wheels, he also portrayed Cash himself creating the character of Johnny Cash—discovering the persona. There’s that extraordinary scene where the Tennessee Three are auditioning for Sam Phillips; after flopping with a tentative gospel song, they launch into “Folsom Prison Blues,” and Cash slowly seems to come into focus. With a few subtle shifts in body language and vocal register, he recreates himself from whole cloth.

In one sense, it’s a showy piece of acting. But the real genius of the sequence is the way Phoenix plays Cash before his transformation: striving, ambitious, but also terrified—playing it safe, hedging his bets.

And there’s the key to his difficulties, I think—that in order to succeed, he’s got to charge in, full-on, and devil take the hindmost. That’s what destroys his marriage, and then his health.

About his marriage: What did people think of the portrayal of Johnny’s first wife? The triangle was extraordinarily painful for all three parties—but the film was so focused on Johnny’s courtship of June that it would have been easy (if irresponsible) to portray Vivian as simply an obstacle to their happiness, as a shrew or a killjoy or an underminer. I thought the script and performances played fair with her, which gave the film a greater depth and resonance. The even-handedness brought the film out of the realm of thwarted romance and somewhere close to an actual tragedy.

There’s a lot more to say, but let’s get some more voices in the mix...
 
 
Slim
13:56 / 26.03.06
I enjoyed the film, though mostly for the music. I thought Reese Witherspoon did an excellent job (I could hear her say "Baby baby baby" all day long). My one regret is that they focused so much on the love story and not so much on how crazy Cash's life was when he was on drugs.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
15:11 / 26.03.06
When I watched this film for the second time, on an airplane, I only switched my headphones to the movie channel for the music numbers, and the rest of the time listened to Cash on my ipod (having bought a best of following my first, cinema viewing of the film).

Reece Witherspoon's performance is the stand-out for me: again, a performance within a performance, as June Carter working her stage face and public persona, utterly professional and instantly setting any doubts or insecurities behind a bright mask.

There are two moments that showcase this -- when she first meets Johnny and gets caught in his strap, and yells out improvised ditsy comedy lines from behind the stage curtain ("Well, Bill... I got tangled!") while giving asides sotto voce that only Cash can hear ("Don't worry, I can keep this funny for at least two minutes.") Even her voice is more stylised when she's working the crowd, and she gets laughs even when nobody can see her.

I like the off-duty, self-deprecating, self-conscious admission, in the next scene, of how she sees her limits, and how she cannily created that funnygirl persona:

"I'm not really much of a singer, Johnny. I mean, I got a lot of personality, I got sass...I give it my all, but my sister Anita's really the one who's got the pipes. That's how come I learned to be funny...so I'd have something to offer."

In other scenes, you witness again her ability to switch between crowd-pleasing banter, smooth and professional, and the muttered asides that the real June fires urgently at her stage partner: when she won't sing "Time's A-Wastin'" ("John, I am not gonna sing that song. It's inappropriate.") and when he asks her to marry him, and she keeps trying gamely to get back into the show routine: "You got these people all revved up, John. Now come on, let's sing "Jackson" for 'em."

The other moment though is in the general store, where she's looking for lace. She performs her charming public side constantly to all the shop assistants, including a middle-aged lady who comments on June's ma and pa being good Christians; "I'll tell 'em you said that," she beams.

When the lady goes on sourly to condemn June herself for going through a divorce, June's bright persona slips only for a moment, before she recovers it -- "I'm sorry I let you down, ma'am" -- and puts the incident behind her by the time she's rounded the next aisle.
 
 
Jack Fear
16:01 / 26.03.06
Yeah. I thought June's own failed marriages helped make the case for Vivian Cash, in a way—June is always shown as smart and capable, and Johnny idolizes her, but even she is prone to making poor choices and being reluctant to deal with them.

It was the women who really owned this film, wasn't it? I mean, what with Mother Maybelle out there packin' heat and fixin' to fill that drug-dealin' feller's hide full a' rock salt—Jesus, that's an earth mother figure I can get behind.

I've got some thoughts1well, at this point they're more inchoate reactions—to Cash's relationship with his father (in which role Robert Patrick underplayed nicely what could've been a tyrannical ogre) and the responsibility that comes with talent... more on that when I've had a chance to collect my thoughts.
 
 
H3ct0r L1m4
16:20 / 27.03.06
good pic, although too similar to RAY to my tastes. it's a like a template for the musical biopic [just try to watch THE 2 SONS OF FRANCISCO or whatever it's called in English].

Cash's life had so much interesting moments that it felt lacking to me [no cave scene or shooting a western scene, damnit]. maybe a TV mini-series could cover it... or even a sequel??

it didn't feel as a movie about Cash rather than one about a failed relationship followed by an obessive romance. no wonder it was named JOHNNY & JUNE down here.

and what about that Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis.
 
 
Jack Fear
16:29 / 27.03.06
"That boy Elvis sure talks a lot of poon, don't he?" = favorite line.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
17:11 / 27.03.06
That Elvis looked as much like Elvis as Phoenix looked like Cash... which is interesting, as they must have opted not to go for a true lookalike. Almost as though they were proposing a coherent fictionalised universe, where this is our "Johnny Cash", and this is what our "June Carter" looks like: actors standing for and representing real people, rather than simulating them. An Elvis who actually looked like Elvis -- which would have been so easy to find -- might have undermined the plausibility of the whole.
 
 
*
17:24 / 27.03.06
Jack, if that was actually what that line was, I'm relieved to hear it. I heard something slightly different.
 
 
Jack Fear
17:52 / 27.03.06
The actual line—I just checked IMDb—is "That boy Elvis sure talks a lot of poon." And that is indeed what the subtitles said (when we're watching a DVD late at night, I often turn the subtitles on wo we can watch at low volume & not wake the kids).

Did you hear it as "racial-slur-that-rhymes-with-poon"?
 
 
*
18:07 / 27.03.06
Yeah, I did. I know that was something a lot of people criticized Elvis for, back in the day, so I must have just assumed that was what they were on about. Thanks for the correction.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
18:20 / 27.03.06
Am I looking up the wrong poon?
 
 
ShadowSax
18:34 / 27.03.06
to reconcile the many historical inaccuracies and also the streamlining of cash's life for the sake of a plot arc, keep in mind the title of the movie, "walk the line" is taken from the song, which is about cash walking the line for his true love. this frames much of the action. the whole movie is about his courtship of june. she appears in the first scenes as a singer on the radio when he's a child. the entire movie is simply a love story.

i think i liked witherspoon's performance better than phoenix's. i agree with everything that was pointed out already about her role. phoenix seemed to simplify cash too much, at least for me. i think reese added more to her character.

the opening scene, i thought, was perhaps the best i've ever seen in a film.

i saw this movie with the person i see most movies with - my partner, who's also a writer, and watching this (and ray), it's sometimes a given for us that creative types are drawn to drugs and addiction and disfunction, since, well, we are too. after seeing "walk the line," we talked about the way that vivian was portrayed, and both of us were under the same impression that she was portrayed as someone who johnny cash simply didnt love and who was then subjected to his outbursts, and because she didnt understand him, she had no way to really communicate with him. hence her inability to understand his problems with trying to separate the road from his home life. afterwards, we read a lot of articles and comments about how viv was probably wrongly portrayed, but i think that she was simply shown as a character within the larger arc of johnny and june's courtship, so coming from that perspective, she needed to simply be someone who didnt understand much at all about not only a creative and brooding person, but also the life of fame that june had been immersed in since birth.

but as far as the drug story goes, i think "ray" actually laid more out for the average filmgoer in terms of why he got caught up in the drugs, where cash's film left most to imagination, and i've talked to a lot of people who saw "walk the line" found it difficult to buy into the repeated drug use. because of that, and because of what seemed during the film to be a forced father-son conflict (and i believe that, in reality, that conflict wasnt as bad as it was made out to be), some of the plot progression in "walk the line" seemed to be a little more superficial than that of "ray."

what i loved about the movie was that, by focusing on his early life and career, we got to avoid the 8-track tape countrified nonsense that surrounded cash when i was growing up. i started discovering cash when he rebounded in the 90s, and got really into his early material, but it was great to see the reckless everyman that he was back then.
 
 
Jack Fear
18:42 / 27.03.06
Am I looking up the wrong poon?

Nope, that's the one. Elvis is obsessed with sex, and talks about it all the time. What's not to understand?
 
 
miss wonderstarr
18:54 / 27.03.06
Nope, that's the one. Elvis is obsessed with sex, and talks about it all the time. What's not to understand?

As is sometimes the case on here, I'm not sure whether this comment comes dressed in irony; but the "poon" I linked to seemed a more recent coinage, specifically for the vagina rather than sex, that I'd only ever heard Ali G coming out with.

But: OK! However, "talks a lot of c**n [racial slur]" wouldn't make sense, would it?
 
 
*
19:13 / 27.03.06
It would, actually. Elvis' music was criticized in his day for "sounding too negro" (in less polite terms). Interestingly, it's easier to find references for modern criticism of Presley for appropriating Black jump blues for white audiences (and the anger seems to be more directed at white people who consider him the founder of rock 'n roll than at Presley himself— see here).

But this is all tangential, and sorry for the rot. Honestly I don't know when "poon" first came into use.
 
 
Jack Fear
19:14 / 27.03.06
Dude, just cos Ali G. is the first one you ever heard say it...

Seriously, it's as old as the hills. From poontang, itself probably from the French putain, meaning prostitute. First OED citation of "poontang" = 1929, in Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, and it was doubtless around long before that.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
19:20 / 27.03.06
It would, actually. Elvis' music was criticized in his day for "sounding too negro" (in less polite terms).

I had read as much -- also that some claim he said something along the lines of black men were only good for shining his shoes. I just meant that "talks a lot of c**n" wouldn't make grammatical sense. "Talks like a c**n" would. But this is getting a bit distasteful.

It's a little off-topic but I found the chapter "All-White Elvis" in Erika Doss, Elvis Culture, very interesting about Elvis' relation to ethnicity throughout his career and after it, in the eyes of various fans.
 
 
matthew.
02:39 / 28.03.06
Just watched this, and not much to add other than great music. The performances are awesome, especially that Jerry Lee Lewis, and especially Reese Witherspoon. What I noticed right off the bat is how Joaquin gets Cash's facial movements during singing. Cash seems to scoop upwards with his chin on certain notes, and I'm really glad Joaquin got that in there. Narrative-wise, it was a little too Ray for me. But I guess this is a problem for a lot of people.

Here's a broader question that may have been addressed in another thread. When Ray came out, I was sure that Jamie Foxx would win the Oscar. My friend said otherwise. She thought the performance was good, but it wasn't Oscar material because it was essentially mimicry. There was no "creation" in his role; he simply stepped into the shoes of a real person. I responded that that definition is exactly what acting is: creating a person and stepping into them. She disagreed. She has the same opinion of Joaquin's performance in this film, as well. Is it good acting because he's a good mimic? Or is it good acting because it somehow... transcends the reality of the person and becomes... universal? Sorry if that's somewhat unclear or incoherent. It's hard to articulate. I hope you get my drift.
 
  
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