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  • Walk The Line - James Mangold
    by Zettel at 00:14 on 16 February 2006
    Screen biographies of celebrities are about dreams. Ours. The accepted constraints of the genre are not cinematic. They are imposed by our expectations. And this is about a curious form of possession. The sense that fans ‘know’ you and claim the right to certain expectations of you, must be the biggest downside of fame. We insist that our celebrity legends conform to the myths we need, not the reality they live. We want a narrative. A story. And just like children we are adamant that the story must follow a familiar structure. So Act 1: the unhappy, often deprived, frequently abusive childhood and the escape to fame through unique talent. Act 2: the struggle for recognition, the rejections, in music always ‘the sound’, the lucky break and the innocent thrill of early success. Act 3: all the problems of handling success, drugs, booze, sex, etc. The strain or break up of relationships, often a fracture in that most precious relationship of all, with the fans. Of course other people are always mere fans - we are discriminating admirers. My hero’s music talks uniquely to me. I know him (or her), because he knows how I feel. See? It’s in the music. Possession.

    Undertaking a biopic is rather like entering the Olympics knowing that if you are absolutely the best ever, you can only get the bronze. Walk The Line takes bronze with distinction. It conforms with absolute faithfulness to the biopic form just as did last year’s Ray and like Ray, WTL contains an extraordinary, sustained, convincingly imitative performance – this time from Joachin Phoenix. Except here there are two: because for all the necessary swagger in Phoenix’s Johnny Cash, it is Reese Witherspoon who brings the proceedings safely home. Just as in the real world, her character June Carter, did for the man behind the legend, the product, that was Johnny Cash. Biopics always set the same initial challenges - how much must the actor look like the star? Who sings or plays? And most of all - how can we make the story conform to the essential generic form without distorting the known facts far enough to undermine credibility? The biopic does not have to be true – but it must be credible. And there’s the rub: it must conform closely enough to what we want to believe or we won’t believe it. We want the person, but we need the myth. Our dreams.

    Phoenix and Witherspoon certainly produce the best ever on screen musical imitations. And it is only when the end credits roll and we hear the two JC’s themselves, that we realise something was missing after all. And in fairness Phoenix has the bigger challenge because of the absolutely unique, depth and timbre of Cash’s voice which was even frequently slightly off-key in its own special and still absorbing way. Oddly it is Cash’s speaking voice that challenges Phoenix most. And his sheer physicality. Except for a few carefully researched stage mannerisms Phoenix simply does not move like Johnny Cash. And his need to lower the pitch of his speaking voice (I suspect) sometimes has the unfortunate effect of making his character sound less slow-talking, than just a bit…well slow. And myth or no myth, that ain’t Johnny Cash.

    So if WTL delivers everything to expectation, entertainingly and with style, what’s the beef? Well it’s about the music, the work if you will. Johnny Cash grew in stature as a songwriter and performer for 35 years after this celebration of his attainment of fame and notoriety ends. Because his biopic panders to our dreams, not his, questions are not seriously asked of the true roots of his angry, melancholic, rebellious, poignant, questing lyrics and hauntingly simple melodies. The two best performances in the movie aren’t even Cash songs – ‘It A’int Me Babe’ (Dylan) and 'Jackson' (Jerry Lieber). Just because such questions are unanswerable doesn’t mean they aren’t worth posing. Cash’s life was at least as much a struggle for faith as it was a struggle for love. He found both - and neither were the clichés shown here. It’s in the work.

    Take one of the worst biopics ever made – Hilary and Jackie (1998). This shameful travesty of a film decided that the most interesting thing about the stricken, tragic life of one of the most breathtaking, life-enhancing youthful musicians of a generation (Jacqueline Du Pre) was whether she slept with her brother-in-law. No such obvious crassness in WTL but the inevitable biopic celebration of attaining celebrity rather than what it produced, short-changes the considerable popular artist and musician that was the real Johnny Cash. Extraordinary collaborations with Willie Nelson, Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings as The Highwaymen for example. And his renaissance as an artist with producer Rick Rubin. More than anyone else Cash kept a thread of real country music running through the explosion of rock n’ roll and beyond. This is shown unintentionally perhaps in WTL when even insipid shadows of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis and Roy Orbison, make Cash’s music of the time sound a little pedestrian in comparison. Rebellion was Cash’s truest link to rock n’ roll. Perfectly illustrated by the centrepiece of the movie and its defining motif – his live concert from Folsom Prison in 1968.

    There was more to Cash than WTL, constrained by the biopic form, even begins to explore. Music, the love of June Carter and a life-long struggle of faith were his salvation from darker things than trashing a dressing room, taking prescription drugs across the state line and being driven to cheat on his first wife. This gloss, as indeed with Ray, reduces the man inappropriately, to a kind of victim. Just as the failure to take the music seriously enough underestimates the uses to which the celebrity was put. But I suppose even in death we require our celebrities to have lived out our dreams not theirs. In a sense, we even own their memory. Some ownership. Some possession. If celebrity is not all it’s cracked up to be, we can feel comfortable not to have attained it. Johnny, Elvis, Ray et al, they all did it for us.

    If the 3 minutes of Cash’s final video ‘Hurt’ were to be played at the end of WTL it would blow off the screen with real, raw emotional power and force the 140 minutes that went before. Especially knowing that June was to die soon after the video was made and Johnny literally to follow her 4 months later. We’re sad and moved at their passing, but we’ve still got the myth. And that never dies. Vicarious immortality.