In 1955, Memphis Sun Studio Recording producer Sam Phillips gave an earnest, young musician a piece of advice.
"If you could sing one song, one song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on earth ... that's the kind of song that truly saves people."
J.R. Cash proceeded to play an original piece called "Folsom Prison Blues." This song would one day bypass The Beatles in record sales.
Walk the Line, the biopic drama of the legendary singer known as "The Man in Black," is a story of a singer's salvation through music, love and God.
Where acting is concerned, however, it is Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter who redeem the film from the status of a merely glamorized musical biography. Each one graces the screen with fire, conviction and fervor that sizzle as much as Cash's songs do. Together, their chemistry fuses into fireworks of lust, fear and passion.
A captivating duet of harmony and discord backstage, onstage and in the bedroom underscores their tumultuous relationship, which teeters between fury and affection. Cash's love for June Carter, queen of country music, manifests itself in tender pleas, passionate proposals and even sprees of destruction. Likewise, Carter, twice married, grapples with her own desires and frustrations toward Cash, a married man. She candidly offers him her own opinions concerning his frequent debauchery, informing him, "You can't walk no line."
Unlike Cash, both Phoenix and Witherspoon successfully walk a fine line by singing all of their own songs. By substituting the venerated voices of Johnny and June for their own, they invite comparisons, and their efforts merit commendation.
While Phoenix' timbre raises eyebrows at first, its steely, sunburned fierceness soon melds with his character, fusing doubt into suspended disbelief. Although his husky voice may lack a smidge of Cash's bluster, he succeeds in sounding, as June says, "steady like a train, sharp like a razor."
As June Carter, Witherspoon is electric, seamlessly switching between her sassy, spunky soprano persona of the Grand Ole Opry to the grounded and pragmatic mother, lover and friend. Her voice, twinged with an effervescent country twang, is lovely, clear and uplifting.
While Phoenix and Witherspoon exhilarate the screen, their co-stars depress it, as the supporting cast deserves no accolades. Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin), Johnny's wife, remains a cardboard cutout of a crying spouse chained down by kids in the living room and a casserole in the oven, her heart repeatedly shattered by her unfaithful husband. Cash's musical contemporaries, including Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison, lack inspiration. The alleged Elvis Presley (Tyler Hilton) not only lacks much physical resemblance, but fails to conjure up even a ghost of The King's sultry mien.
Based on Cash's works Man In Black and Cash: The Autobiography, Walk the Line follows in the wake of other cinematic, musical eulogies such Coal Miner's Daughter. In fact, the film shares startling parallels with last year's Ray: Both men suffered the childhood trauma of a brother's tragic death that would haunt them for years to come. Likewise, the euphoria of stardom lured each singer to the destructive despair of drug abuse.
For Cash, the pill-popping leads both to fractured personal relationships and time in jail. The scene of his writhing withdrawal is part physical, part confessional, as he purges the demons of his soul to June, his "angel."
Some of the most intimate scenes in the film are those of the singers' solitude. Whether Cash is huddled in darkness, picking chords on his guitar or Carter is solemnly plucking her dulcimer, each musician is lost in a reverie of composition. Such moments crystallize the conception of songs that would not only save their composers, but much of the world.
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