Walk the Line review
Feb. 4th, 2006 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThe last Veronica Mars episode was delightful, but I can't think of anything useful to say about it. I also saw Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon.
The two of them got just Oscar-nominated, and they deserve it. It's a clichéd truth that villains or handicapped people make for more showy performances, and nice people are much harder to present as interesting. (As I got reminded again last year when writing for the Multiverse Ficathon, I certainly find two bastards far easier to write than two very nice people interacting with each other.) But Witherspoon, as June Carter, makes niceness incredibly compelling. She's sweet, she's funny, she's tough, and all that without coming across as too good to be true. Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash is basically Portrait of The Singer As James Dean without going over the top there, either. His best moments are when he's reacting, watching and listening. Three scenes that stood out for me in particular: the classic "artist finds his voice" scene which comes when Cash and friends audition with a standard gospel for Sam Phillips and Phillips (btw, extra points to the film for not going the obvious "suits as enemies of the misunderstood artist" route) first tells Cash just why he sucks (and he does) and then issues a challenge by stating that the kind of song he should be singing was the one after he got run over by a truck and was lying dying in a gutter, with only that one song left to be remembered for. Sounds overdone, but the scene does't come across that way, and the camera keeps showing us Phoenix' face while Phillips talks, and you can see the rage, frustration, and dawning realization and determination all flicker through.
Then there is perhaps the most obvious Dean/East of Eden homage, the stare-a-thon of Johnny Cash and his father, much, much later in the film. If there is a villain in the film, Cash Senior, with his guilt-tripping his son about his other son's death and disdain shown throughout, would be it, and that scene, coming after Cash Senior has observed his son still taking tablets and lying about it, encapsulates it all. It's just there on Phoenix' face.
And lastly, a scene in the first half or middle: when Cash is observing young Elvis on stage from the wings. Thankfully the script trusts the audience has a minimum of intelligence and doesn't include any godawful lines like "gosh darn, I think that Elvis kid has a future!". Cash, who just had his share of enthusiastic audience response and fangirling, watches Elvis getting even more of same and looks amused and a bit intrigued while Elvis sings "That's alright, Mama!" and the girls go wild.
Storytelling wise, this is a conventional biopic - we start with a scene setting up the Cash mystique, the concert in Folsom with the inmates waiting for Johnny Cash to make his appearance, then flash back to his childhood with the crucial traumatic loss-of-brother event, and go linear through military service, early marriage, kid, recording, meeting of True Love, tours, obstacles, drug abuse, falling apart, recovery, big highlight of career, True Love finally says yes, happy end. Still, this tried and true formula is so well played that it's impossible to dislike. If I had to nitpick, I'd chose just one aspect, and it's not the conventional narrative. (The truth of which I have no idea about - it can be entirely accurate or completely fabricated in comparison to Johnny Cash's real life, so I'll leave the question of authenticity completely out of it.)
It's what you could call the first wife treatment. Walk The Line isn't as obvious with this as a tv movie about John Lennon and Yoko Ono which I saw eons ago. (I think it was called The Ballad of John and Yoko, but they might have used another of his song titles.) In said tv movie, John Lennon's first wife, Cynthia, appeared in about two scenes. First we saw her looking as mousey as possible, knitting, sitting in front of the tv. Later on, we saw her on the tv, telling people she was divorcing John. None of that real life mess with Cynthia coming home from her vacation to find Yoko in her bathrobe having breakfeast with John, or John then having the gall and the cheapness of trying to divorce her for adultery before he was talked out of it. You could just see the scriptwriter and producers thinking that the audience didn't just have to believe John and Yoko were meant for each other but that there should be no way anyone should feel sympathy for dumped Cynthia instead.
Like I said, Walk the Line isn't that obvious. We see Vivian - who is presented as pretty - a lot of times, we see her trying to be a good Wife And Mother. But at the same time, the manipulation is constant. She gets scenes where she tells Johnny she doesn't want to talk about his tours with him (aha, she doesn't understand him, as opposed to, you know, JUNE who he just met a few scenes earlier en tour), she is rude to June before, not after, June and Johnny have sex with each other for the first time, there isn't a single scene where she's shown on her own trying to deal with the absent husband and first one, then two kids (we only hear such stuff over the phone while Cash is the one being shown to the camera), and so on. I think I would have routed for our leading couple as well if they had shown me one or two Vivian pov scenes.
Back to the praise. The film wisely doesn't try to present us with every single celebrity Cash ever met; the only one who gets enough lines to become a character in the early sections is Jerry Lee Lewis, sardonic egomaniac, and when he suddenly says "we're all going to hell, every one in this car is going to hell" during a late night drive after a concert, you have the whole Southern Baptist background thing captured in a sentence. (And when June later finds the lot of them boozing it up on stage instead of practicing, you're so with her when she starts to throw their bottles at them.*g*) The two "composing" scenes of the film, Cash hitting on the "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die" line and June starting to write "Ring of Fire" don't feel artificial, which I guess is the pay off of letting the actors actually do their singing and string-plucking. Which they do splendidly, by the way.
Then there's the entire handling of Cash's addiction. Once he's addicted, he's lying to everyone, including June, repeatedly, doing several fake recoveries, doing the manipulative "oh, I'm better now" routine while popping more pills - and it's not prettified or excused. The results are anything but romantic or creativity-inspiring. Yet at the same time, it doesn't come across as an easy "drugs are bad for you" message - it's clear that Cash's emotional problems weren't caused by taking pills, and aren't ended once he's clean for a while.
So, when the curtain closes on a kiss at the end and Our Heroine has finally said yes to Our Hero's proposal of marriage - on stage - you do think they'll have their happily ever after, in a qualified way. He might fall of the wagon again. Or demolish a few more hotel rooms. But you do believe what the credits tell you, that they remained together for the rest of their lives.
The two of them got just Oscar-nominated, and they deserve it. It's a clichéd truth that villains or handicapped people make for more showy performances, and nice people are much harder to present as interesting. (As I got reminded again last year when writing for the Multiverse Ficathon, I certainly find two bastards far easier to write than two very nice people interacting with each other.) But Witherspoon, as June Carter, makes niceness incredibly compelling. She's sweet, she's funny, she's tough, and all that without coming across as too good to be true. Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash is basically Portrait of The Singer As James Dean without going over the top there, either. His best moments are when he's reacting, watching and listening. Three scenes that stood out for me in particular: the classic "artist finds his voice" scene which comes when Cash and friends audition with a standard gospel for Sam Phillips and Phillips (btw, extra points to the film for not going the obvious "suits as enemies of the misunderstood artist" route) first tells Cash just why he sucks (and he does) and then issues a challenge by stating that the kind of song he should be singing was the one after he got run over by a truck and was lying dying in a gutter, with only that one song left to be remembered for. Sounds overdone, but the scene does't come across that way, and the camera keeps showing us Phoenix' face while Phillips talks, and you can see the rage, frustration, and dawning realization and determination all flicker through.
Then there is perhaps the most obvious Dean/East of Eden homage, the stare-a-thon of Johnny Cash and his father, much, much later in the film. If there is a villain in the film, Cash Senior, with his guilt-tripping his son about his other son's death and disdain shown throughout, would be it, and that scene, coming after Cash Senior has observed his son still taking tablets and lying about it, encapsulates it all. It's just there on Phoenix' face.
And lastly, a scene in the first half or middle: when Cash is observing young Elvis on stage from the wings. Thankfully the script trusts the audience has a minimum of intelligence and doesn't include any godawful lines like "gosh darn, I think that Elvis kid has a future!". Cash, who just had his share of enthusiastic audience response and fangirling, watches Elvis getting even more of same and looks amused and a bit intrigued while Elvis sings "That's alright, Mama!" and the girls go wild.
Storytelling wise, this is a conventional biopic - we start with a scene setting up the Cash mystique, the concert in Folsom with the inmates waiting for Johnny Cash to make his appearance, then flash back to his childhood with the crucial traumatic loss-of-brother event, and go linear through military service, early marriage, kid, recording, meeting of True Love, tours, obstacles, drug abuse, falling apart, recovery, big highlight of career, True Love finally says yes, happy end. Still, this tried and true formula is so well played that it's impossible to dislike. If I had to nitpick, I'd chose just one aspect, and it's not the conventional narrative. (The truth of which I have no idea about - it can be entirely accurate or completely fabricated in comparison to Johnny Cash's real life, so I'll leave the question of authenticity completely out of it.)
It's what you could call the first wife treatment. Walk The Line isn't as obvious with this as a tv movie about John Lennon and Yoko Ono which I saw eons ago. (I think it was called The Ballad of John and Yoko, but they might have used another of his song titles.) In said tv movie, John Lennon's first wife, Cynthia, appeared in about two scenes. First we saw her looking as mousey as possible, knitting, sitting in front of the tv. Later on, we saw her on the tv, telling people she was divorcing John. None of that real life mess with Cynthia coming home from her vacation to find Yoko in her bathrobe having breakfeast with John, or John then having the gall and the cheapness of trying to divorce her for adultery before he was talked out of it. You could just see the scriptwriter and producers thinking that the audience didn't just have to believe John and Yoko were meant for each other but that there should be no way anyone should feel sympathy for dumped Cynthia instead.
Like I said, Walk the Line isn't that obvious. We see Vivian - who is presented as pretty - a lot of times, we see her trying to be a good Wife And Mother. But at the same time, the manipulation is constant. She gets scenes where she tells Johnny she doesn't want to talk about his tours with him (aha, she doesn't understand him, as opposed to, you know, JUNE who he just met a few scenes earlier en tour), she is rude to June before, not after, June and Johnny have sex with each other for the first time, there isn't a single scene where she's shown on her own trying to deal with the absent husband and first one, then two kids (we only hear such stuff over the phone while Cash is the one being shown to the camera), and so on. I think I would have routed for our leading couple as well if they had shown me one or two Vivian pov scenes.
Back to the praise. The film wisely doesn't try to present us with every single celebrity Cash ever met; the only one who gets enough lines to become a character in the early sections is Jerry Lee Lewis, sardonic egomaniac, and when he suddenly says "we're all going to hell, every one in this car is going to hell" during a late night drive after a concert, you have the whole Southern Baptist background thing captured in a sentence. (And when June later finds the lot of them boozing it up on stage instead of practicing, you're so with her when she starts to throw their bottles at them.*g*) The two "composing" scenes of the film, Cash hitting on the "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die" line and June starting to write "Ring of Fire" don't feel artificial, which I guess is the pay off of letting the actors actually do their singing and string-plucking. Which they do splendidly, by the way.
Then there's the entire handling of Cash's addiction. Once he's addicted, he's lying to everyone, including June, repeatedly, doing several fake recoveries, doing the manipulative "oh, I'm better now" routine while popping more pills - and it's not prettified or excused. The results are anything but romantic or creativity-inspiring. Yet at the same time, it doesn't come across as an easy "drugs are bad for you" message - it's clear that Cash's emotional problems weren't caused by taking pills, and aren't ended once he's clean for a while.
So, when the curtain closes on a kiss at the end and Our Heroine has finally said yes to Our Hero's proposal of marriage - on stage - you do think they'll have their happily ever after, in a qualified way. He might fall of the wagon again. Or demolish a few more hotel rooms. But you do believe what the credits tell you, that they remained together for the rest of their lives.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 04:58 pm (UTC)Anyway, I'm rambling, but great review -- and I see you on the first wife problem as well.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 05:16 pm (UTC)Yes, lj does tend to change one's perspective on things. Brokeback Mountain hasn't started here yet, btw, next week, and I'm looking forward to watching it, though I'm feeling somewhat irritated by one of the stars (Heath Ledger), who reminded me that yes, the world away from slash fandom has another perspective by stating in an advance promotion interview he gave to a German paper that he really, really hadn't looked forward to kissing his male co star, but you know, duty, etc. etc. Which is fairly typical. I remember Terry Farrel saying when DS9's fourth season was broadcast on how great an episode Reunion was to shoot for her, but that she really, really hadn't been looking forward to kissing her female costar, but duty, etc., etc.
I think Susan Sarandon must be the glorious exception. She declared decades ago, apropos shooting "The Hunger" in which her character doesn't just kiss but has sex with Catherine Deneuve's character that the script originally had her character drugged at that point, to which she said "but who would need to be drugged to want to have sex with Catherine Deneuve?" and got the script revised.*g*
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 05:30 pm (UTC)I'm a dissenter from the whole BBM phenomenon and haven't seen it yet (I read the story it's based on years ago and disliked it; I'll probably catch it on DVD but I'm saving my 8 bucks). Not because of the slash, obviously, but because the whole self-conscious myth-making of the American West tends to bore me. In Proulx's story the characters kept coming across as "symbols" rather than human beings, and I'm not sure that the film is going to get that much better.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 05:44 pm (UTC)(This reminds me that Amber Benson and Aly Hannigan did not do the "oh, but it was soooo harrrrrd to kiss a girl" complaints back in the day.)
The script of the film was written by Larry McMurtry, though, wasn't it?
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 05:49 pm (UTC)The Joss quote is from a post he made on Whedonesque a few weeks ago in response to a long thread in which some people were complaining about the existence of slash -- I've only heard it second-hand myself, so I don't know what the exact thread was.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 06:05 pm (UTC)The relevant thread is here: http://whedonesque.com/comments/9323
Joss Whedon's comment is here: http://whedonesque.com/comments/9323#106460
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 08:27 pm (UTC)And that is way up there on my 10 Hottest Scenes Ever Filmed list, oh yes!
no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 09:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 06:40 pm (UTC)Your comment, The film wisely doesn't try to present us with every single celebrity Cash ever met; the only one who gets enough lines to become a character in the early sections is Jerry Lee Lewis, is fascinating to me b/c it goes back to what I was saying about Reese's performance. While almost everyone seeing the movie knew the Cash story to some extent before seeing the movie. June has to work for you (who didn't know her at all before the movie), me (who grew up with the stories), and my grandparents (who remember the story). Reese manages to make June work for every level of familiarity with the story - and it is amazing.
And the movie as whole performs a similar feat and manages to make the story work no matter your prior knowledge. That you did not recognize all the celebrities and associates in the movie does not mean they weren't there: Johnny's band was there (Larry Bagby playing Marshall Grant which was cool), on the Chitlin Circuit tour the kid in the glass was Roy Orbison & the other guy was Carl Perkins, the guy John was living with when he walked to the Carter house was Waylon Jennings (played by his son, which was eerie), etc. The movie doesn't tell you how far John would have walked to walk from Nashville to the Carter's, you know it is far but not how far, the movie doesn't tell you that one of the songs Johnny & June sing is a Bob Dylan song. If you know all these things then they do matter when you are watching but if you don't know them you don't notice them.
It is to the movie's credit that it does not assume viewer knowledge or force the perspective to an uninformed one (or an informed one). It just tells the story. The more the viewer knows of the details, the more folk tale it is for the viewer, the more detail and history there is in each moment. But the story works, as its own story, equally well without all of that.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 03:59 am (UTC)Have you seen the video for "Hurt"? After seeing Walk the Line it breaks you up that much more.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 08:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 02:26 pm (UTC)P.S.
Date: 2006-02-05 09:15 am (UTC)Re: P.S.
Date: 2006-02-05 02:19 pm (UTC)