Outstanding acting and music

Rating: 8/10 (20 November 2005)

What a good movie! My friend and I whispered this to each other several times during the movie. If you like mature biographies, superb acting, and terrific music, then you should like this. Never mind the critics who moan that the story follows "the standard biopic formula." I think that they've been too jaded by watching too many movies to appreciate a good, real-life story.
Phoenix and Witherspoon were superb in this engrossing, true story of the love and music of two legendary star musicians. Many others have already praised them for their acting and singing, so I won't repeat that in detail here. For me, it was important to know that the real Cash and Carter gave their approval to these wonderful young actors. I was glad as I watched that I could trust that the movie was being fairly faithful, at least, to the facts.
However, I couldn't rate the movie 10 out of 10 because of a few problems. The biggest is the downplay of the Christian content. A few allusions are made to Johnny's crisis of faith and his redemption, the attitude of some of June's conservative fans to her divorces, and her remarkable parents, but only a few. As a Christian, I think that I could extrapolate some of what Johnny and June must have been thinking or feeling with respect to their beliefs at crucial moments, but I couldn't be sure without a more explicit portrayal. Doubtless this is the result of a decision by the producers and director to avoid making secular audiences uncomfortable, but Jesus Christ was, in reality, very important to these peoples' lives. For example, I doubt that Johnny's recovery from drug addiction was just a matter of him learning to find and love himself, as the film seems to imply. After the events of the film, the couple spent years making gospel records and performing shows with evangelical services included. Additionally, for a Christian, adultery and divorce for the sake of love is not just a matter of considering morals and hurt feelings, but also of sin and obedience to God. A brief scene after his drug recovery showing June taking Johnny to church that stops at the church door just doesn't show enough about what must have went on inside them. This would have been a more powerful and meaningful film if it had.
Another problem is that, according to one of her daughters, Vivian Cash was not quite the antagonistic shrew portrayed in the movie. She was actually proud of her husband's career until he started the drugs and "stopped coming home." This sounds plausible to me, and I suspect that there was some minor telescoping and fudging of the truth, besides.
It's difficult covering 25 years in 2 hours, but there's virtually nothing about significant people like Johnny's long-term band mates or June's children.
But I still loved this movie. Even if there weren't enough scenes for the story, almost all of the them were plausible.
Some of my favourite scenes: Sam Phillips telling Johnny that he didn't believe him when he sang his gospel tune for his audition. That gave me food for thought for when I sing hymns in church!
June modestly, politely telling a judgmental fan that she was sorry for letting her down when the fan called her unworthy of her parents and un-Christian because of her divorce. A natural reaction would have been to bite back or run away, but Witherspoon made a lovely show of restraint and humility.
June's mother telling her to go back and help Johnny when I as her parent would have opted to keep such a loser away from my daughter.
June's parents helping out Johnny's drug recovery by chasing away Waylon Jennings from Johnny with shotguns!
P.S. I found Reese Witherspoon more beautiful and charming in this movie than in any of her previous ones I've seen.
P.P.S. For those of us here in Canada who were wondering what that tiny town somewhere in "Ontario, Canada" (it must be too insignificant to be named) was where Johnny proposed to June on-stage: it was the mid-sized city of London! Did the subtitle editors omit "London" because they thought that it was going to be confused with London, England?! Or is Canada just not important enough in their minds? They wouldn't have done that if the city had been, say, the smaller Buffalo, New York, eh?!