Cold, Hard Cash
Walk the LineDIRECTED BY James Mangold
STARRING Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick
“People are going to call this ‘the Johnny Cash movie,’ and I can’t help that,” grumbles James Mangold, director of the new, um, Johnny Cash movie, Walk the Line. “People will say this is the Johnny Cash biopic. But I don’t divide movies by genre like that. I think of Batman Begins as a biopic. Why not? Because it didn’t really happen?”
Well … yeah, if you want to be technical about it. But it’s easy to understand why Mangold, the genre-hopping auteur responsible for Cop Land, Identity and Girl, Interrupted is wary of the “b” word, which, as the director says, suggests less a fun time at the movies than a grueling history lesson replete with expository dialogue and hideous old-age makeup. Indeed, with the notable exception of Ray, most recent filmmakers tackling real-life musical subjects seem to have determinedly avoided the trappings of conventional biopics — Gus Van Sant’s recent Kurt Cobain–inspired Last Days was decidedly abstract, while Todd Haynes’s forthcoming I’m Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan will feature no fewer than seven different actors portraying Mr. Zimmerman, including the Irish Colin Farrell and the female Cate Blanchett.
Although Walk the Line, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as Cash, is a far more traditional venture than either of those two projects, it avoids the clunky melodrama of a broad-stroke life story to focus instead on the ’50s-’60s courtship between Cash and soulmate-to-be June Carter, played by Reese Witherspoon. Since said courtship had to overcome their respective marriages as well as Cash’s raging drug addiction, the result often comes across like Romeo and Juliet, but with more amphetamines.
“Yeah — and better music,” says the 40-year-old Mangold, a self-described “obsessive musicologist” who first met Johnny and June in 1999 to discuss the project, although both of them passed away before getting a chance to visit the set. “I felt like most people under 30 knew John as an old singer, as the gravel-voiced patriarch of the American Recordings albums,” Mangold explains, referring to the series of Rick Rubin–produced records that introduced the country legend to a new generation as a proto-punk godfather. “I didn’t want to make a movie about that guy, though. I loved that guy, but in order to make the film more immediate, you need to have the love story.”
Mangold was also clearly not much concerned about whether his cast physically resembled the people they were playing. “Casting Joaquin was a gut feeling,” Mangold confesses. “I just felt he had the same sort of restlessness John had.”
In fact, Phoenix’s un-Cash-like visage actually aids the director in his task of presenting not Johnny Cash: The Man in Black but Johnny Cash: The Man Still Struggling With His Talent and Haunted by the Death of a Beloved Older Brother. At times, Phoenix even seems to be channeling James Dean, a favorite of Cash, who told Mangold he fell in love with his first wife, Vivian, because she resembled one of Dean’s girlfriends. Meanwhile, Witherspoon, in an Oscar-bait performance, is perfectly nuanced as a woman who realizes, to her horror, that she has fallen in love with a philandering junkie. The fact that Carter is country music royalty looking to emerge from her family’s formidable shadow is refreshingly beside the point.
Phoenix and Witherspoon also perform their characters’ tunes with aplomb, as Mangold surely knew they would do, the director having, Blender assumes, made sure the pair’s vocals were up to the task before casting them.
“Actually, I had no idea whether they could sing,” says the director. “I just believed it was going to happen.”
Didn’t any studio exec, you know, inquire as to this tiny detail? “Yeah,” laughs Mangold. “And when they asked, I would say, ‘Sure, they sound great!’”
But perhaps more important than the central pair’s singing ability is the fact that they are more than believable enough as lovers, albeit frequently thwarted ones, to have even the flinty-of-heart wiping away tears by the end. Certainly, the end product justifies Mangold’s decision to concentrate on this particular slice of life rather than the cradle-to-grave.
“We could have chucked in all the historical landmark events,” says the director. “But who gives a shit? This is the story of a man in search of his angel.”
