WALK THE LINE (2005) **1/2 It's an entertaining enough movie, but I don't feel like they got anywhere as close to the real Johnny Cash as most guys on barstools do just listenin' to him. The critics loved Joaquin Phoenix' portrayal-he did a fine (if unintentionally amusing) job of over-emphasizing some of Johnny's onstage postures, looks and gestures, and he did a great job in getting across that Johnny was a tormented man during this period (and the writers did a good job of pointing the blame at his southern father, without hammering it too much)...but he just never gets at the heart of the man, there's no depth to it all, which is particularly damning in the portrayal of a man blessed in the soul category. Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash, same thing: she catches the onstage playfulness that everybody loved, which has to be some of the hard part, and portrays a certain southern belle softness and toughness as one incredible thing, but it wasn't June, for me. I mean, you have to give them credit for not airbrushing the thing into Johnny Cash as Santa Claus (the drug thing is almost underplayed, if not for their excellent if necessarily abbreviated portrayal of how it affected everyone), but it just goes on like that. Shooter Jennings looks like a really cool outlaw-and his daddy was King of the Outlaws-but Waylon Jennings didn't even start looking that cool for another five years, at least. Waylon Payne does a great job of catching the comic book aspects of Jerry Lee Lewis, but you have to already know the story to have any sense of how deranged and dangerous the man actually was (is). It was an incredible time-the rockabilly fork in the road between organic rock and what would become the blueprint for all (inferior to this, unfortunately, too merged with pop) country music within a decade-but the film never catches anything like the actual greatness that was involved. I really hope these same people don't decide to do the New Testament next. For Johnny Cash, listen to the records, and know that he loved June, as lot.
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