Jump through a Burning Ring of Fire to Walk the Line

If you lined up Joaquin Phoenix and a young Johnny Cash and asked me to pick the real man, I'm not sure I could. If you gave me a sound test, playing snippets of the same song by each I might very well pick Phoenix as the real deal. He plays Cash better than Cash did.

Walk the Line follows Cash's life from his childhood on an Arkansas cotton farm learning to sing from his mother's hymnal to his years struggling as a newlywed trying to make ends meet while still making it in the music business to his time with Sun Records through his famous Folsom Prison concert and marriage to June Carter. The movie stops there, choosing not to go beyond the emotional culmination of the love affair showcased through much of the film. The very early years are shown briefly, almost vignette style, with just a look at the handful of seminal incidents of childhood and early adulthood.

The story really gets rolling once Cash forces Sam Phillips of Sun Records to give him a tryout. Not happy with the typical gospel presentation, Phillips pushes Johnny to give him something of himself, to sing that song he'd want to sing if he knew he was going to drop dead in the next five minutes. Cash responds with "Folsom Prison Blues" and the rest, as they say, is history.

Johnny's soon one of the headliners on the Sun Records tours along with Jerry Lee Lewis (the awful Waylon Payne), Carl Perkins (Johnny Holiday), Elvis (Tyler Hilton; decent until he tried to sing and move on stage), and June Carter (Reese Witherspoon). Cash first meets Carter here and they become friends with just a hint of a slight flirtation. Both are married to other people, both have very young children, and that keeps things under control, at least for a while.

We watch their relationship ebb and flow, just as their careers do. Divorced, then remarried, then divorced again with two daughters, June Carter is wary of further romantic involvement, especially with a man she's seen booze it up with the best of them and who she knows has a bit of a problem with pills. Walk the Line doesn't pull punches but also doesn't drown you in sorrows. We see just enough to really feel the characters, to get their motivations, to understand when each hits rock bottom and to cheer when they get up again.

Witherspoon isn't quite in the same league as Phoenix; although she's good and a surprisingly decent singer, you never forget the fact that she's just playing a part. Her character takes a bit longer to really shine than Cash, probably because we don't meet her until she's an adult and until after we've already gotten a very good feel for Cash. She never quite catches up, but given just how amazing Phoenix is as Cash, that's not entirely surprising.

The songs were terrific, especially the versions of "Walk the Line" and "Ring of Fire" and the later of the duets. They were usually paired up to specific points of the narrative extremely well, underscoring some point or some emotion of one or both of the leads. I did feel slightly let down once in this regard though. As Cash is at a low point with the pills and Carter's giving up on him for a while, we see her start to write "Ring of Fire". We then periodically see her struggling with the lyrics at particularly low points in their relationship. However, instead of the satisfaction of seeing her finish the song or give it to Cash or any type of resolution, the song disappears until it's suddenly sung by Cash on stage some time later at a high point. I thought that dropped the ball a bit and the setup we got with the song deserved more.

In addition to the relationship between Carter and Cash, Walk the Line explores family, explores the way we relate to the people we care about and the people foisted upon us by genetics. It looks at the power the words of a parent have over a child, how one negative word can be stronger than all of the positive statements from everyone else. It also examines how our self image, often shaped in part by those parental complaints, affects how the rest of the world sees us. All of this is woven in, sometimes blatantly and sometimes much more subtly, woven among the music and the drugs and the romance.

Walk the Line is not a perfect movie. It has flaws, some obvious and some a little harder to pinpoint. Like the Man in Black himself, it presents a marred image to the world yet succeeds anyway. You don't need to be a fan of Johnny Cash or country music to like this movie; it tells a universal story of love and loss and triumph over tragedy. It's a deeply human story about a deeply human man. The music is just a wonderful bonus.