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Monday, December 12, 2005
Each year, it seems, some film that is generally well-received by the critics and public fails to engage me in the same manner. I usually set about on a crusade to rant about the film to anyone who will listen. A year ago it was Collateral and the year before was Mystic River. Many will be surprised by the winner of this year's contempt: Walk the Line.
Despite my initial reservations when I heard that a Johnny Cash biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix was being released so soon after the whole Ray sensation, I was eventually drawn into anticipation following rave reviews from a majority of critics and many friends. Though complete factual coincidence, the inevitable comparisons to Ray were immediately brought to the foreground as we learn early in the picture that as a child, John, like Ray Charles, suffered through the loss of a close brother to a tragic accident. Both films portray this childhood event as a source of pain and driving force in each icon's career. I cannot blame the director for including this, but in my own mind it seemed territory that was far too familiar.
The biopic is a difficult film to write as the major events in the live's of most subjects are spread out over many years. When I think of biopics that succeed in doing more than merely bouncing from highlight to highlight I have to go as far back as Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Films like Walk the Line, much like The Aviator, seem to spread themselves too thin. By skipping several years between scenes it is hard to develop flow and truly get a feel for what is driving the subject. This may be the greatest failure of Walk the Line. Johnny Cash was a complicated man, yet director Sam Mangold simplifies his character and decisions to two subtexts. One is how he is haunted by the death of his brother, as well as the verbal abuse from his father that resulted. Second, and the focus of the movie, is his obsession with June Carter (I never thought I would say...or write...this, but I was actually impressed by Reese Witherspoon).
The scenes between Cash and June were almost unbareable to watch. Johnny Cash, a man that is so often referred to as a "musical John Wayne," a man that is associated with Folsom and San Quinton prisons, and a man that sings of "blood and mud and beer" comes across as a whiny, weak, lost young man. Perhaps the constant pining for Miss Carter is accurate in the context of that portion of Cash's life, but in this snapshot, Mangold fails to show us how the man that we have come to know and revere came around. June is credited for finally straightening out and cleaning Johnny up, however, I had a hard time seeing how the man presented to us on screen develops into a man who stood for so many many social causes and wrote songs such as the Ballad of Ira Hayes. The focus is on the love story and while the music is paraded in front of us it is never investigated. We get a glimpse of June's struggles that produce Ring of Fire, and it is impossible to miss where Walk the Line came from, but are we really to believe that the passion Cash had for prison inmates was inspired solely from a B movie he watched during military service (it is historically acurate, I must include, that he wrote Folsom Prison Blues after watching this movie)?
As I was doing some research I came across this obituary from the Village Voice and was amazed at how the man portrayed in Walk the Line did not resemble the man described in this article. I understand that this was written well after Johnny Cash was canonized as not only a musical legend, but an American legend, but Mangold's biopic does a poor job of revealing the seeds that would produce such an intriguing part of Americana.
Despite my initial reservations when I heard that a Johnny Cash biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix was being released so soon after the whole Ray sensation, I was eventually drawn into anticipation following rave reviews from a majority of critics and many friends. Though complete factual coincidence, the inevitable comparisons to Ray were immediately brought to the foreground as we learn early in the picture that as a child, John, like Ray Charles, suffered through the loss of a close brother to a tragic accident. Both films portray this childhood event as a source of pain and driving force in each icon's career. I cannot blame the director for including this, but in my own mind it seemed territory that was far too familiar.
The biopic is a difficult film to write as the major events in the live's of most subjects are spread out over many years. When I think of biopics that succeed in doing more than merely bouncing from highlight to highlight I have to go as far back as Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Films like Walk the Line, much like The Aviator, seem to spread themselves too thin. By skipping several years between scenes it is hard to develop flow and truly get a feel for what is driving the subject. This may be the greatest failure of Walk the Line. Johnny Cash was a complicated man, yet director Sam Mangold simplifies his character and decisions to two subtexts. One is how he is haunted by the death of his brother, as well as the verbal abuse from his father that resulted. Second, and the focus of the movie, is his obsession with June Carter (I never thought I would say...or write...this, but I was actually impressed by Reese Witherspoon).
The scenes between Cash and June were almost unbareable to watch. Johnny Cash, a man that is so often referred to as a "musical John Wayne," a man that is associated with Folsom and San Quinton prisons, and a man that sings of "blood and mud and beer" comes across as a whiny, weak, lost young man. Perhaps the constant pining for Miss Carter is accurate in the context of that portion of Cash's life, but in this snapshot, Mangold fails to show us how the man that we have come to know and revere came around. June is credited for finally straightening out and cleaning Johnny up, however, I had a hard time seeing how the man presented to us on screen develops into a man who stood for so many many social causes and wrote songs such as the Ballad of Ira Hayes. The focus is on the love story and while the music is paraded in front of us it is never investigated. We get a glimpse of June's struggles that produce Ring of Fire, and it is impossible to miss where Walk the Line came from, but are we really to believe that the passion Cash had for prison inmates was inspired solely from a B movie he watched during military service (it is historically acurate, I must include, that he wrote Folsom Prison Blues after watching this movie)?
As I was doing some research I came across this obituary from the Village Voice and was amazed at how the man portrayed in Walk the Line did not resemble the man described in this article. I understand that this was written well after Johnny Cash was canonized as not only a musical legend, but an American legend, but Mangold's biopic does a poor job of revealing the seeds that would produce such an intriguing part of Americana.
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