Published on VenusZine.com, September 2005 By: Gretchen Kalwinski
Writer Richard Rodriguez poses the theory that love is an “active agent within history,” and that the history of the world is actually the history of people blending together and resolving differences in the name of love. Similarly, Walk the Line is not a music film, or even a biopic, but instead a film that tells the story of Johnny Cash’s life through the lens of love.
The first half of the film is made up of Cash’s childhood and simple country boy-beginnings, his first pangs of the music bug and gospel roots, and marriage to wife Vivian Liberto Distin, mother to four of Cash’s five children. But make no mistake about it, his meeting and decade-long flirtation with June Carter of country music royalty the Carter Family is the real focus here.
The latter half focuses on Cash’s drug habit and eventual redemption. This is a tale of boy meets girl (while boy and girl are married), boy becomes famous (and simultaneously pursues girl while also developing a nasty drug habit), and eventually the love of girl helps boy turn his life around. A diner scene the night that Cash and Carter first meet is a subtly acted and well-written conversation between 2 people that would continue to be intrigued and delighted by one another through 35 years of marriage.
Directed by James Mangold and based on Cash’s autobiographies Man in Black and Cash: The Autobiography, much of the film takes place while on tour, where Cash and Carter’s forbidden attraction played out alongside such luminaries as Jerry Lee Lewis, Waylon Jennings, and Roy Orbison. Joaquin Phoenix plays a wry, tortured, and passionately quiet Cash, complete with haggard facial lines that remarkably resemble Cash’s own. Reese Witherspoon’s Carter is a spunky showboat with a chirpy vulnerability that is appealing and true. The film makes the assumption that the audience already understands Cash’s legacy, and is light on the music-making or creative details of Johnny or June’s music, other than one scene showing Cash writing songs while in military service, and a scene depicting a pensive Carter composing “Ring of Fire” on her autoharp.
The film nicely encapsulates the strange glory of the moment in musical history in which this love story takes place, when blues, country, gospel, and rocknroll were feeding off of each other and melding as if by osmosis. And, during the requisite detox portion of the film, June is shown by Johnny’s bedside while Mother Maybelle Carter, grande dame of the Grand Ole Opry, stands at the outskirts of Cash’s property with a shotgun to ward off his mustached drug dealer.
In one scene, the tour car is heading from one venue to another and Carter is sitting in the backseat, complaining about the boyish antics of her cohorts. When the car finally pulls into their motel, Carter twangs, “Somebody get me out of this car with all these boys!” Her humble traveling companions at the time are none other than Jerry Lee Lewis, Cash, and Elvis Presley. Later in the film, Carter is more cynical about the habits and vices of the “boys” and we see her transform from a comic, girlish figure to a tough, understanding woman who will put up with little guff from Cash or anyone. The growth that takes place in the film is as much about her as it is about Cash. During their 35 year marriage, he’d credit her (loudly and often) with saving his life, and died four months after her passing. From the point that the two met, their life stories became invariably intertwined, and there is no way to separate the trajectory his life took from hers, to credit one with success without crediting the other. Devotion between a big mouthed woman and a long-legged guitar pickin’ man, and a true American love story indeed.
Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox
