Good but Lacks a spark

Rating: 7/10 (25 August 2006)

This is a good family movie. Good performances, good storytelling, good music ( of course if you like Johny Cash). It looks like many other autobiographic movies, but tells the story of Johny Cash instead of Elvis Presley, John Nash or anyone else. It lacks something that unifies itself from other movies like it. Walk The line follows a common formula of a Rise - Fall - Rise again,but except of the tragic opening, the movie isn't a tear dropping experience, and not too dramatic. Except this, the movie is abundant with good music, some funny moments and never boring.
I didn't read the biographies of Johny Nash, so I don't know in which detail he portrayed his life, and what part of it the director did not show us. What the director focused about is the developing love between Johny Cash and June Carter Cash throughout a decade, until they got married. This part done exceptionally well. One can feel the true love between them. So if we don't look at it as a biography, it is a great love story.
There are other aspects of Johny Cash's life that were briefly shown but weren't developed. One of those is the relationship he had with his fellow musicians in the Sun Records. We see brief performances of Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, names that everyone know and that the main Character been close to (they toured together) for a while, but we don't see the interaction between them (or lack of interaction). We also see a brief scene with Johny Cash and Walon Jennings, when they shared an apartment together, also without too many words about them.
My point in the last paragraph is, that we study people not only by their stories but also by their relationship with others, and how others see them. We also could learn something about Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis from the way Johnny Cash saw them. That part of his biography lacked for me in this movie.
The biggest surprise for me was that the main characters did all the performances by themselves. I think that Reese Witherspoon may start a singing career.