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Walk the Line

Directed by James Mangold
Written by Gill Dennis and James Mangold
Rated PG-13
Starring Joaquin Pheonix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Robert Patrick

Walk the Line is great entertainment, and heavy on the music, which was obviously the right choice. It's a movie that thrives on the duets sung between the two leads, but the story it tells, while it doesn't break any ground, gets the job done smoothly: it is both touching and interesting, especially for those of us who really didn't know anything about Johnny Cash, myself included.

I did, however, know quite a bit about Joaquin Pheonix and Reese Witherspoon, which I feared would take me out of the movie. Sure, I'd heard they gave great performances, but c'mon…it's clearly Pheonix and Witherspoon standing right there…right? Pheonix in particular is an actor I would've never imagined to play a popular American singer; when I think of him I think straight to his period-piece roles in Gladiator and Quills. Witherspoon mostly just makes me think of a once-promising career drowning in too many uninteresting movies.

Well, Walk the Line renews my faith in her and reinvents my image of him. As for Witherspoon, she honestly disappears in the role. I kept actually trying to take myself out of the movie to see Witherspoon, the actress, playing June Carter. But she completely sold me in the role -- once again a reminder that she's a wonderful young actress when she wants to be. As for Pheonix, all traces of the quiet, twitchy, brooding, consistently vexed young character I usually see him as give way to the loud and charismatic vision of Johnny Cash.

In terms of the story, it's engaging and well done. One of the most interesting things I found was that Cash didn't really get to be famous through any means but conventional hard work. He played in a band with two guys, they auditioned to make a record, impressed Sam Phillips of Sun Records (Dallas Roberts in an uncommonly well-done role for such a minor character), got a record, and then very slowly gained fame and fortune.

Throughout much of this Cash is stuck with his first wife, Vivian Cash. The woman who plays her, Ginnifer Goodwin, has the utterly thankless role of the always-complaining, always-suspicious, always-annoying woman in the way of Cash's ultimate destiny of marriage to June Carter. Robert Patrick well plays Cash's father, laboring a decades-long grudge that "God took the wrong son" -- when Cash was a boy, his brother was killed in a sawing accident.

The most important things about the movie, though, is that Pheonix and Witherspoon both pull off the singing beautifully. I don't know much about the guitar, but Pheonix seemed to handle it well. But he captures Cash's voice perfectly -- "steady like a train, sharp like a razor" -- and Witherspoon does just as well. No matter how dramatic the story is, and no matter how well it works, which it does, the best parts of the film by far are on stage with Johnny and June. It's the type of movie that makes you want to download all of Cash's hits from the internet once you leave the theater.

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