Toeing the Hollywood Line on Johnny
By Josh Larsen

Like public squares at Christmas time, movies today are under pressure to be purged of any hint of religious faith.

 

How else to explain Walk the Line, a musically rousing but factually ignorant movie biography of Johnny Cash?

 

This proudly religious singer-songwriter’s story was one of moral failure and eventual redemption, with Christian faith as his saving grace. Yet Hollywood here reduces the man’s life to the usual sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll cliches. If it weren’t for the presence of Cash’s music—among the most distinctive of American sounds—you could drop just about any rock star of the twentieth century into this film without altering the storytelling much.

 

Knowledgeable Cash fans will find the biographical omissions annoying. Everyone, though, will enjoy the music to which the movie is dedicated. Using Cash’s chugging rhythms and plowing bass as a metronome, Walk the Line struts with a seductive swagger during its many musical numbers. It opens with a wallop, as “Folsom Prison Blues” rumbles through the walls of San Quentin State Prison, where Cash performed live in 1969.

 

Joaquin Phoenix, best known as the conniving Commodus of Gladiator, does Cash justice with his hound-dog vocals and heavy lids. Phoenix sings on the soundtrack, and while he doesn’t deliver as spot-on a piece of mimicry as Jamie Foxx did in the recent Ray Charles biopic, he’s adept at capturing his subject’s conflicted spirit. Too bad the filmmakers didn’t allow him to carry his portrayal all the way through to the dramatic transformation that his subject eventually underwent.

 

Instead, director James Mangold and co-screenwriter Gill Dennis traverse the well-beaten path of the rock-star bio, following a storyline eerily similar to last year’s Ray. There is the perfunctory treatment of childhood tragedy—in both Cash and Charles’s cases, the death of a brother—along with a few nods to the church songs that inspired the boy’s musical talent. The movie presents such religious influences as quaint at best—sort of a cute, country-bumpkin aspect of growing up.

 

From there the movie jumps into Cash’s early success, where the more sensational aspects of his life can be mined to full effect. Cash’s first wife, Vivian, is presented as a shrewish skeptic of his musical dreams, making it easy to dismiss her once life on the road brings the familiar scenes of promiscuity and substance abuse. Here we’re treated to the standard mythologizing of the rock-star lifestyle, in which there’s a pretense of disapproving of the very behavior that is being glamorized. It’s a hypocritical, paint-by-numbers approach, mercifully broken up here and there by roaring concert scenes.

 

To be fair, all of this was part of Cash’s experience, and deserves to be in a movie biography. The failure of Walk the Line is its insistence on treating such scenes as defining moments, while leaving out the deeper elements in Cash’s life that eventually made him stand apart.

 

The truth is that drinking and pill popping left Johnny Cash at a lonely dead end by 1967. That inspired an existential break which transformed him from cliched, rockabilly burnout to piercing preacher (through his music) of the power of Christianity to sober and invigorate. Walk the Line hints at this deliverance, but only in the romantic terms necessary to guarantee a conventional happy ending.

 

Instead of his faith, the movie focuses on June Carter as the source of Johnny’s salvation. A member of the famed Carter family of traditional country musicians, June (played by Reese Witherspoon) became Cash’s second wife. Walk the Line rightfully acknowledges her role as his guardian angel, but downplays the religious nature of their relationship. The film would have us believe it was just her love—not her abiding faith—that pulled Cash out of his downward life spiral.

 

And so Walk the Line ends just as the most unique chapter of his life begins: his late musical career, with its deep Christian-themed projects that reclaimed his artistry from moneymaking schlock, and won him widespread acclaim.

 

Of course, that part of Cash’s life was filled with the sorts of things Hollywood astutely avoids: committed relationships, people over 30, and powerful religious belief. The crux of Johnny Cash’s life was his struggle to walk the line from the hymn-raised days of his youth to the hymn-singing days of his later years. That’s a faithful journey that Walk the Line is too timid to make.

 

 

Josh Larsen is TAE’s movie columnist.