completely wonderful portrayal of sensitive subject matter

Rating: 10/10 (14 March 2006)

Even if you're not a fan of family saga, Walk The Line is worth seeing, just for the highlights of watching and listening to Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon perform musically. But this movie is even much more, at the heart, which will surprise the movie goer. Joaquin, as Johnny Cash plays the underdog country crooner with heart wrenching grit, style, and surprising sensitivity, sensibility, and sentimentality. His addiction to prescription pills never supports the happiness he truly desires and yearns for with June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), who will later become his second wife, after divorcing his first wife Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin), played passionately. June is not only perky and positive, but she's intelligent and firm with Johnny when it comes to her stance against his drinking and pill popping.
Many of his lyrics reflect love, heart ache, desire, but also darkness, despair and even destruction. He's a man who is forever attached to man's anguish ridden, and often times, battling psyche. As long as he's wearing black, he's singing about such conflicts, "walking the line," between sobriety and inebriation, clarity and crime, punishment and compassion. He feels empathy and warmth, where most would feel finality and coolness. This story is so colorfully depicted, even though the man always dressed in black. A challenge succeeds and surpasses our preconceived expectations. We only wish that Johnny, himself, lived with greater multi-color from within himself.
For communication lacking in his first marriage, he saves with music, a mutual passion, in his second marriage, to June. Sadly, his first wife never fully accepts that music is integral to himself and hence, their relationship, and marriage. She persistently sees his music as separate from the two of them, even attempting to stop him from hanging band photos on a room wall. At a loss, she is unable to accept him for who he is completely, a man who identifies with himself, others, and life, through lyrical stories, in music. For her own dreams to justly come true, their divorce is inevitable, as their goals, desires, and dreams are not one in the same or shared. June, a talented singer in her own right does understand and is the closest aura of light and color to shine around and within him. But, it doesn't mean that she doesn't have her own share of conflicts, with the man dressed in black. Her hesitancy to get involved with a married man shows her own struggle to remain true to her morals, and respect for herself, for him, and his marriage. When June finally weds Johnny, he is truly blessed to have a shining light to his personal sentiment, and his professional path, a singing and performing career, one she not only acknowledges and praises him for, but contributes with her own talents as well. When things are good between them, personally and professionally, things are great for all, especially their fans, but when things are bad, moments are embarrassing for themselves and their public. But even through the strife, Johnny comes out a survivor, realizing the significance of love he has with June. In a final scene, his father Ray (Robert Patrick) and grandchild are playing telephone talk, with can and string, in the Cash backyard. Johnny helps his dad out and says to him, "Pull a little tighter on the string," and we smile, thinking how Johnny is capable of tightening the meaning to his own relationships, especially the one between him and his wife. He can't change the past with his father, but he can accept the present and make the most of what good things his father can offer, as a dad and a man. What a wonderful script and touching film about such delicate subject matters, brought to life by two very thoughtfully and thoroughly engaged actors, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. The supporting cast is the glue that shapes the work, telling the whole story, in all of its trials and tribulations. Even if you're not a huge fan of family saga, this film might draw your own sensibilities tighter.