Magic

Rating: 10/10 (18 April 2006)

This is why movies exist. This is movie magic: It's alchemy, something that cannot come true without something unexplainable, and that something must be love. One other ingredient is story. Best stories, the only stories that matter, come from life. Life of human beings. Life of REAL people, LIVING people. And stories of real people don't get written down or made to any form of art too often. The reason is that real people are not too frequently any kind of artists.
Artists themselves are not very often what I would call living human beings. In my experience they are many times more or less mentally "ill" people, who run away from their lives rather than people who would confront it and live it. Which is of course totally contrary to the idea, that at least I have, about what an artist should be. Personal therapeutic art is a different case, but that is not meant or made to any other person than the patient.
But Johnny Cash is a real human being. And I say IS, because in this movie, he lives. I don't know or even care about who got the Oscars, Oscars are sh*t anyway, same as every other prices: Nothing more than politics, if not even less. But Joaquin Phoenix in this movie is something more than an actor: He IS Johnny Cash. If you squint your eyes just a little bit, there he is. And that's a miracle: I really felt like I went to Johnny Cash's living life. I don't remember ever having that feeling in a movie. At least not in ten years or something. And Reese Witherspoon... It's so beautiful.
From Mangold I've seen before the movie "Girl, Interrupted", which I love (love, love). On the basis of these two movies, I say that Mangold is one of the three most important movie makers active and ALIVE today. I've seen maybe two thousand movies, but this is one of the few that matters.