Walk The Line - Mobile Edition

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Walk The Line
By Al Kratina
February 27, 2006 - 23:02

Writer(s): James Mangold & Gill Dennis
Starring: Joachim Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick
Directed by: James Mangold
Release Date: Feb. 28 2006 (DVD)
Genre: Drama/Biography

I Think I've Heard This Song Before.

There's no such thing as 'just a horror movie'. Horror movies can be incisive examinations of the societal fears that hover just below the surface of group consciousness, ready to be unearthed through allegorical films of the fantastic. There is also no such thing as 'just a comedy', because sharp satire can illuminate important issues and arguments that are perhaps ignored in civilized and staid debate. There is, however, such a thing as 'just an action movie', because most of those are made to keep teenage mall-rats away from things they can shoplift for a couple of hours, and there's certainly no category other than ‘just a bio pic’.

Essentially, the main problem with bio-pics, of which multi-Oscar nominated Walk The Line is a prime example, is that screenwriters are forced to shoehorn 20 years of someone’s formless, shapeless life into a three act structure. So, they rely on clichés that become so familiar you could give Joachim Phoenix a fat suit and three dozen rhinestones and I'd get this mixed up with the Elvis mini-series. I've seen so many music films in which a revelatory look passes over a bored record executive's face as he witness the birth of a brand new sound that I'm beginning to wonder if there was ever an old sound to begin with.

That said, Walk The Line isn't bad. It's just not great. The music is fantastic, and occasionally Phoenix does disappear into his performance. But the real star of the show is Reese Witherspoon as June Carter, who breathes life into what could easily have become a stiff imitation. Her Dolly-Parton-meets-Danzig roar is spot on, too, but the essential problem with the film is that we never really understand their relationship on anything more than a superficial level. Cash seems to have spent most of his life as a mumbling drug addict, but Carter sticks by his side for no apparent purpose other than to provide an romantic subplot. The film tries so hard to force Cash's drug battles and romance into a Hollywood movie format, it loses any warmth whatsoever, become just a tired retread of bio-pic clichés. Walk The Line fails because it tells us the facts of Johnny Cash's life, but it doesn't tell us a story, or at least not one that I can believe.