gravitas lite

Rating: Null/10 (26 January 2006)

I didn't for one minute buy Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash. I didn't buy the guy who played Elvis, or the guy who played Jerry Lee Lewis, and as good as she was, I didn't buy Reese Witherspoon as June Carter either. I did buy the woman who played Mother Maybelle, she seemed authentically downhome, as did Robert Patrick as Johnny's dad, but the rest of the TV movie-ish cast seemed too young, too pretty, too uncountrified, andWitherspoon exceptedtoo thespianically challenged. That being said, I still enjoyed the movie, the camera work and retro set design looked good and the direction was understated and the whole thing actually came alive for one moment during the Folsom Prison concert scene. But the last part of the film focuses too myopically on his drug problems back then, and whatever the essence of Johnny Cashness iswhich despite the black clothes includes a knowing nod and a wink and infectious Southern high spiritedness that are fairly absent in Phoenix's somber, morose, inward performanceit's buried by the film's single-minded interest in Johnny's dysfunctional courtship of June. Which is portrayed interestingly enough, but the impact that Cash's stubborn class-conscious country songs had on popular music during the 60s gets sidelined along the way, assumed rather than shown, and the film nearly loses track of what made him a great artist.