The paint-by-number script trudges doggedly from one milestone to the next in this biopic about the early career of Johnny Cash.
By:Elise Nakhnikian
With his sonorous bass, black garb and obsidian stare, Johnny Cash looked like a hero or maybe a villain from a spaghetti western. But if "The Man in Black" was a self-made myth, he also seemed utterly self-assured: a grown man even when he was just starting out.
Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Cash in Walk the Line, has the right coloring and the right air of quiet intensity, but that’s about it. Like just about every other American actor of his generation, Phoenix seems as if he’ll never quite outgrow adolescence. Hunching his shoulders as he gazes up from under thick eyebrows, he looks painfully self-conscious and defensive, a boy playing a man.
The body language might not have mattered so much if the filmmakers had let us hear Cash’s voice in the musical numbers, but Phoenix does his own singing. And where Cash sometimes went vibrato, Phoenix just sounds shaky, straining to hit those signature low notes and never managing to echo Cash’s dirge-like authority.
Although Sissy Spacek, who laid down amazingly faithful tracks in Coal Miner’s Daughter, is the exception who proves the rule, letting actors who are playing singers do their own singing is generally as bright an idea as showing reproductions painted by the actor in a movie about the artist. Lip synching may detract from the sense of authenticity when Ashlee Simpson does it on Saturday Night Live, but it has the opposite effect when Jessica Lange is playing Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams or Jamie Foxx is channeling Ray Charles in Ray.<</i>br>
About Ray. You can’t watch much of Walk the Line without thinking about last year’s singer-songwriter biopic, whose long shadow makes this year’s model look even duller. There are a surprising number of surface similarities. Both cover their subjects’ first years on the road, their early successes and their struggles with addiction. Both intersperse flashbacks to a hardscrabble boyhood in the South, which center around the haunting memory of a brother’s death. And both men have daddy problems a missing father in Charles’ case and a coldly abusive one in Cash’s.
But Ray, which buzzed with the energy of Foxx’s brilliant performance, was bracingly honest about the ruthlessness of Charles’ pursuit of artistic freedom not to mention money, good times, and gorgeous women while Walk the Line feels airless and overly stage-managed. Every big event is foreshadowed, and every song is tied to some event in Cash’s life. Any time the camera lingers on something, you can be sure Cash will be singing about it soon.
The paint-by-number script trudges doggedly from one milestone to the next. Scenes like the obligatory montages of Cash’s growing success and his withdrawal from black beauties (even his drug of choice is black) get more time than they deserve. Meanwhile, forces of nature like the other Sun Records artists Cash toured with are reduced to stereotypes or played for cheap laughs. Elvis makes a brief appearance, for instance, mainly so he can offer Cash some chili fries and another musician can remark that he "sure likes to talk poon." And the love story that anchors the plot, in which Cash woos country/gospel sweetheart June Carter for years and she keeps refusing him at first because one or both of them is married and then because of his addiction seems to last almost as long as it did in real life.
Reese Witherspoon is funny and feisty as Carter, but she has a hard, almost virginal edge that makes it impossible to picture the passion that presumably led her into and out of her two failed marriages and made her "burn, burn burn" for Cash. The brittle, chin-up assertiveness Witherspoon played for laughs in Election and the Legally Blonde movies is less appealing when she plays it straight. When Carter lectures Cash we’re meant to admire her, seeing a loving woman helping a lost man learn to "walk the line," but instead she seems more like a disapproving scold.
Meanwhile, Ginnifer Goodwin, who plays Cash’s first wife, invests her character with dignity and warmth, making her more than just the nagging drain on Cash’s creativity that the script portrays. The chemistry cooked up by the two actresses knocks the story off-balance, making it hard to buy the Cash-Carter romance.
What’s worse, the movie gives you no idea how Cash developed as an artist or how he did anything much, for that matter, aside from getting dissed by his daddy and mooning over June. At one point, June chides him for acting as if he stumbled on his sound and his all-black wardrobe by chance. "Give yourself credit for something, Mr. Cash!" she says. But judging by Walk the Line, it doesn’t look as if he has a whole lot to claim credit for.
Rated PG-13. Contains some language, thematic material and depiction of drug dependency.

