Walk the Line is everything Ray was not

Rating: 8/10 (19 September 2005)

Walk the Line
reviewed by Sam Osborn of www.samseescinema.com
rating: 3.5 out of 4
Director: James Mangold Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon Screenplay: James Mangold, Gill Dennis (based off the Johnny Cash autobiographies) MPAA Classification: PG-13 (language, drug content)
To be honest, I've never been a fan of Johnny Cash's music. I listened to it every now and then when flipping through the presets in my car, stopping to sing along to the few lyrics I knew, but I never gave the musician much thought. Until now. For me, Walk the Line is everything Ray was not. Ray was plagued by an uneven screenplay, but got enough sentimentality and acting points for people to look past its flaws, and managed to nab a Best Picture nomination. Walk the Line, however, is worth all the press it's likely to get. With acting work just as impressive as Ray's, music just as affecting, and a screenplay that hits all the right chords, Walk the Line is a fine, fair biopic for Mr. Cash.
The film faces the threat of what music critics call "same-songiness". A volley of biopics have been released in the past year making it only a matter of time before American audiences call it quits for the genre. Making matters worse, the story arcs for Ray and Walk the Line are essentially the same. A small time musician with tragic childhood memories goes on to become an international sensation, but finds himself wrapped up with extra-marital women and illegal drugs. Yes, it sounds like a re-hash of Ray, but believe me, Walk the Line's storytelling works much, much smoother.
Also, what Ray lacked was romance. Yeah, yeah, I know, there was that cute scene with the hummingbird; but that little tidbit will be soon forgotten when Reese Witherspoon hits the screen. Taking on the role of June Carter, Witherspoon takes a page from her role in Vanity Fair (and not Just Like Heaven), and completely inhabits her character. Her pairing with Joaquin Phoenix yields beautiful chemistry and makes their romance believably realistic, something I frankly didn't feel with Ray.
There's sure to be some trepidation over the fact that Director James Mangold used Phoenix and Witherspoon's real voices for Cash and Carter's songs. Again, I'm not really an authority on Johnny Cash music, but from what I've heard, Phoenix and Carter nail it. And Cash enthusiast Roger Ebert, who was in the same screening room as me and heard the same songs, stated afterwards that he was incredibly impressed by their mimicry.
To extend my comparison between Ray and Walk the Line, I found James Mangold's directing style for Cash's biopic to be very similar to the formula used by Taylor Hackford in Ray. Each put a strong visual emphasis on the musical scenes and neither busied themselves with distracting camera tricks or visual pizazz. There are beautiful shots to be found in both films, but this is no Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener) behind the camera. Instead, where each director plays his cards is with the screenplay. And this is where Walk the Line truly shows its colors.
Biopics are difficult in that a coherent story must be told over a great span of chronology. Films often run into the problem of trying to fit too much into a two hour film, an issue Ray suffered from. For instance, when Ray starts his downward spiral with Heroin and begins poking himself with needles, there were often straight cuts to joyous scenes of his son being born, or him returning home to his wife from a tour. The story never let itself settle down with a mood and tell a coherent story. Instead, the film jumped around so much, it left audiences dazed and numb to the emotions on-screen. But Walk the Line avoids this problem with James Mangold and Gill Dennis' screenplay, which is based off of Cash's two autobiographies. The script gives Walk the Line a backbone for the story to follow, keeping a foundation for the sub-plots to wrap themselves around. This foundation is Cash's obsession with June Carter. His childhood story and even his music are motivated by this romance. She was the center of his life up until his death, and she's the center of this film. And with Witherspoon's performance as terrific as it is, the foundation is solid as rock.
If the American public is still willing to pay money for a musician's biopic, then Walk the Line's their film. Of the recent four I've seen (De-Lovely, Ray, Beyond the Sea), Walk the Line's the finest.
-www.samseescinema.com