Movie Reviews: “Walk The Line”

“Walk The Line” should begin with the first date on Johnny Cash’s first tour: June Carter, on her way to the stage, manages to get her dress caught on Cash’s guitar strap, and this awkward exchange is how the two meet. Perplexedly, this scene occurs one fourth of the way into the picture.

Director James Mangold (“Girl, Interrupted”), who also wrote the script, spends the first 35 minutes of the film giving us gratuitous back story: Johnny’s miserable childhood, his brother’s death, his father’s drinking, his time in the Air Force. None of the scenes are necessary, as each event is explained sufficiently with simple dialogue later in the film.

Perhaps Mangold felt the need to show us these events because Joaquin Phoenix, who portrays Cash, can’t convince us with his performance that they ever happened.

Phoenix spends so much time perfecting Cash’s postures and mannerisms that he doesn’t get around to showing us whatever’s behind them.

In this year’s “Capote,” Phillip Seymour Hoffman gave us insight into the mind of Truman Capote without worrying too much about looking or sounding like him, proving he understood what Phoenix does not: when portraying a real person, it is important to create a character. Acting is more than impersonation.

Mangold and Phoenix’s job is to convince us that we want to watch their depiction of Johnny Cash. It is not to convince us that we are actually watching him.

Hollywood’s biopics are successful only with a convincing portrayal of their subjects. Last year’s “Ray” shares the tired plot devices in “Walk the Line”, but the sheer finesse of Jamie Foxx’s performance makes it worth seeing.

Reese Witherspoon, who often uses her endless charm and wit to keep drowning pictures afloat (see “Legally Blonde”), is perfectly cast as June Carter. Going in, many who see this movie, will not know as much about June as they do about Johnny. Witherspoon uses this unfamiliarity to her advantage. She is free to play around with June a little and shows us a woman who onstage is quick, funny and effected with a ditsy Southern drawl, and offstage is smart, steady and decisive.

Although Cash’s other tourmates share less screen time than Carter, they are similarly effective. The first tour is the most enjoyable segment of the film because Cash is perpetually surrounded by his band of boys.

Newcomer Waylon Payne, who plays the cocky and energetic Jerry Lee Lewis, makes his scenes memorable, but even better are the delightfully weird moments between Cash and Elvis Presley. Once before Johnny hits the stage, Elvis, strumming and shadowed in a corner, calls him over to compliment his songs and offer him chili fries.

The film spends much of its time focused on Johnny’s drug problem, and Phoenix can’t sell it. During the drug-use scenes, I got the peculiar feeling that if the camera wasn’t there to record them, they wouldn’t be happening. He boozes, pops pills and trashes his dressing room because the script tells him to, and because those are the actions the makeup circles under his eyes would suggest.

More telling is one scene where Johnny – late and heavily inebriated – stumbles onstage and begins to sing. The camera darts around him, jumping into his wild-eyed face and behind to reveal him silhouetted in the bright stage lights. The scene is manic and inventive. It proves that a single visual metaphor can tell us more than pages of dialogue.

The picture’s best dramatic moments also occur onstage. In concert, Witherspoon and Phoenix have a chemistry not present anywhere else in the film. Phoenix’s Johnny Cash imitation suffices in these concert scenes. He even gets the singing right. So why not tell Cash’s life story in the span of just one concert-all drunken stumbling and telling looks and marriage proposals-only in 90 bearable minutes and not 140.