Half-truth, good movie

Rating: 8/10 (27 November 2005)

Is an incomplete truth still true? After seeing Walk the Line, the tale of the rise, fall and resurrection of Johnny Cash from 20th Century Fox, two glaring omissions from his story jump out immediately: 1.) Cash's commitment to Christ in the latter half of his life and 2.) the latter half of his life.
The film, under the direction of James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted), follows the well known pattern of music biopics. We start with Cash as a child to get the back-story on what made him who he became, fast-forward through other formative experiences, see his fame increase, see him come crashing down through the emptiness of life on the road and see him redeemed by the love of a woman.
In this respect, Walk the Line is a gem, much like last year's Ray. The viewer is confronted in expertly shot scenes with the harsh realities of fallen humanity and the truth that fame has a unique power to corrupt. The magic of Cash's story, however, is that the height of his fame was later, after his turnaround. Perhaps Hollywood's eternal bias against all things Christian (unless you're a Catholic) kept Mangold and the producers (who included Cash and Carter's son  one would think he'd focus on the father he knew) from pursuing that aspect of his life.
Don't get me wrong, this is a well made movie. The acting is particularly stunning. Casting Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter (Cash) was a stroke of genius. In fact, IMDb.com reports that Cash and his wife hand picked their on-screen portrayers when plans for the movie were made before they passed away in 2003. The duo even spent months learning to sing and play the guitar and auto harp to seal the authenticity of the film. Phoenix's stage presence is eerily Cash-like; I often found myself wondering whether I was watching an actor or a recording of the man himself.
Additionally, though the film (by necessity) was without a defining secondary character, the various supporting parts were brilliantly cast. Robert Patrick's coolly hostile Ray Cash provides the backdrop to his son Johnny's drive for success and meaning. Tyler Hilton as Elvis Presley, Waylon Payne as Jerry Lee Lewis and Dallas Roberts as Sun Records founder Sam Phillips gave the film a genuine insight into the birth of popular culture as we know it.
Walk the Line is, as Cash's music, "steady like a train and sharp like a razor." It never soars quite like it could, though. Cash and Carter's failed marriages are never truly resolved to the point where the viewer feels right in rooting for their love (the real Cash and Carter shared one of the longest, most exemplary marriages in the history of pop-culture icons  it is widely claimed that Cash died of a broken heart shortly after June passed). Cash's inner struggles with the God he was raised to love and his ultimate redemption through Christ that were barely hinted at in the film might have made a better story in their own right.
At one point in the film, Cash and his "band" perform a gospel tune that he wrote in audition for Phillips, and the famed producer stops them halfway through to say that their music was no good because he couldn't believe in them. Cash angrily asks Phillips if he's saying he doesn't believe in God. Phillips responds that Gospel is unmarketable and Cash needs to believe in himself to succeed.
"If you were hit by a truck, and you were out there lyin' in the gutter and you could sing one song, one song to let God know how you felt about your time on earth, one song to sum you up; that's the kind of song that truly saves people," Phillips says, at which point Cash busts out a little tune he wrote once, "Folsom Prison Blues." Though this incident may have started the hero on the road to success, the rest of the movie implies that belief in God was what held Cash back. What ultimately saved him from the gutter, however, was the Gospel he first sang about, and its impact on him reflected in "Hurt," "The Man Comes Around" and other songs from his later career is what burned him into the memory of fans for generations to come.
Unlike many such music films, Walk the Line is probably least enjoyable to fans of Cash's music. The righteous crusader and country music legend that most people under the age of 50 think of when they think of Johnny Cash is all but absent from the movie, leaving many of us wondering what the point of the film was. The middle of a story seldom stands alone, and the tale of the Man in Black is no exception.