Walk the Line - Austin American-Statesman movie review

'Walk the Line' stumbles through a love story

By MICHAEL CORCORAN
Austin American-Statesman

The grizzled inmates clap and stomp along with the band's "boom chucka boom" rhythm, while the star of the show solemnly stares down before taking the stage at Folsom Prison. "Walk the Line" opens with the anticipation of an historic concert, and filmgoers are similarly led to believe they are about to embark on a moving cinematic portrait of a musical giant. Unable to dial up "gaunt," cherubic Joaquin Phoenix looks more like Ray Liotta with a harelip than Johnny Cash, but he does seem to have a grip on the singer's brooding heart. And what better way to fill the darkness of a theater for a couple of hours than with the raw primality of vintage Cash and his comrades from Sun Records?

Strap yourselves in, music fans, you're in for a great ride!

20th Century Fox

'Walk the Line'

2 out of 5 stars

Director: James Mangold
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Shelby Lynne, Robert Patrick
Run time: 135 minutes
Release date: November 18, 2005
Rating: PG-13 for some language, thematic material and depiction of drug dependency.
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But the creative numbness starts to set in just moments later when the camera goes back to the beginning of the story, panning a cotton field in Arkansas while Blind Willie Johnson's slide guitar moans and slurs on "Dark Was the Night Cold Was the Ground," as overused a piece of music as Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's "Over the Rainbow." Executive music producer T-Bone Burnett, still coasting on the "O Brother Where Art Thou" windfall, makes an equally hackneyed selection later, pulling out Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" to underscore growing insanity and addiction, just as it had been used decades earlier — and better — in "Where the Buffalo Roam."

All the well-worn moments of Cash's career are touched on in corny fashion (aka "musical film bio syndrome"). Groan along as his first wife Vivian, portrayed as a nagging killjoy, holds up a multicolored shirt when Johnny's putting on a black one. Then, at an early live performance, a seemingly shellshocked Cash comes onstage and lets several tense moments pass before announcing "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash." You've got the drunken walk in the rain when Cash is drowning in hopelessness and the footlight-stomping episode in Las Vegas and the El Paso perp walk/Ray Ban commercial after a pill bust. There's also the part where Carter chews out a drunken, leering Cash, by saying "You can't walk no line" and then the next scene is the band playing "Walk the Line."

As predictable and slow-moving as rush hour traffic, "Walk the Line" is a lazy retelling of the already well-known love story of Cash and June Carter, who both passed away in 2003. The James Mangold-directed movie — which focuses on the years between 1955, when the couple met, and 1968, when they married (thus keeping the wardrobe vintage) — reeks of a vanity project for a pair of young stars scooping up cred points on the way to their next gladiator and dumb blonde blockbusters. Although she displays a fine singing voice, Reese Witherspoon is miscast, playing hillbilly tomboy June Carter as a 1950s-era Shania Twain. This is not a dig at Carter, known for her spunk and country royalty bloodlines, but Witherspoon is simply too sexy, too attractive for the role. Part of the enduring appeal of the Carter/Cash love story is that they did not possess matinee idol looks, yet found kindred beauty in their souls. Witherspoon's Carter would make Elvis melt.

Fans of Sun Records-era rock 'n' roll likely will talk back at the screen like middle-aged women at "Waiting To Exhale," especially when Phoenix sings such classics as "Folsom Prison Blues," "Get Rhythm" and "Cry Cry Cry" without any sense of the nuance that gave Cash's common man vocals their distinctive character. The actor does get the stage mannerisms down, especially the way the legend tilted back his chin between verses and fired his guitar at the audience. There are flashes, usually in profile or from a back angle, where Phoenix looks exactly like Cash, but add them all up and it comes to about 45 seconds. You'll spend almost as much time wondering, "Now, who's he supposed to be again?"

The twin themes of the story — Johnny is haunted by the horrific death of his older brother and obsessed with June Carter at an early age — are established early to provide a darkness and light counterpart. Going in, you know this is not going to be a happy flick, but ultimately the dreariness takes over until the sunlight at the end charms like a hangover at dawn.

Unintentional comic relief comes from a mess of cameos by nonactors playing dress-up. Singer Waylon Payne (the son of Willie Nelson's guitarist Jody Payne) pegs Jerry Lee Lewis as a frat boy with a bad haircut. Shooter Jennings plays Shooter Jennings, even as the Cash character keeps calling him by his dad's name, Waylon. And when "Elvis" (or was that Ashton Kutcher?) speaks from the shadows to ask Johnny if he wants some chili cheese fries, this film goes deep inside the stereotyping pool.

The best scene, when producer Sam Phillips coaxes "Folsom Prison Blues" out of Cash at an audition that began poorly, begs for more about the musical evolution of the songwriter and less about continual marriage proposals that lead to what you already knew.

Above all, "Walk the Line" is tedious. The lead actors no doubt saw Oscars dancing when they took the gig, but then found out too late that the story's just not that thrilling. (Pill popping, for instance, is the least cinematically engaging form of drug addiction, seeing as how the same motion is used for eating Milk Duds).

Unlike Gary Busey's Buddy Holly, Angela Bassett's Tina Turner, Sissy Spacek's Loretta Lynn and Jamie Foxx's Ray Charles, Phoenix's Cash and Witherspoon's Carter are not Oscar-worthy (which is not to say they won't be nominated.) Watch "Walk the Line" do a couple of big weeks at the box office, then slip away into the darkness of well-intended musical film bios that missed the point.