Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Sometime last year, in reflecting on where I thought MPL could go and what I would be happy with, I set the line at the point where I was getting free schwag to review. It occurred to me that if I could just go around telling people what I thought about music, which I like to do anyway, and I could get my CD-junkie habit fed for free, then that would be the summit…that would be my something for nothing. So when M80 contacted me on behalf of Fox Home Entertainment about reviewing the brand new Extended Cut DVD of Walk The Line, the 2005 film about Johnny Cash, I couldn’t say no.

Walk The Line is ostensibly about Johnny Cash, but I find it is really more about the relationship between Cash and June Carter, his soulmate and future wife. As that couple, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon play these roles to perfection, but director James Mangold deserves maje props for bringing their connection to the forefront. Johnny has his worst struggles with drugs, women, and simply drawing breath when June isn’t around, but he’s together and collected when she’s with him. Likewise, we miss her as the audience when she’s not on screen, and not just because we can see Cash self-destructing. Witherspoon brings a tender but vibrant energy to the role that is palpable even when it is absent.

It’s striking that it still holds so much power a few years later. Parts of the film don’t hold up anymore, after they received the Walk Hard, Dewey Cox treatment. It’s hard to watch Cash’s rags-to-riches-to-rags voyage into drugs, groupies, and self-inflicted violence without feeling tired of the cliché. I defy you to watch Walk Hard and then see the tearing-the-sink-off-the-wall scene as any kind of insight into unrequited love or drug addition. It doesn’t make Cash’s struggles any less bitter or tormented, but the story really is always the same. To be fair, though, I don’t know whether there is a way to tell this kind of story without it feeling like just another episode of VH1’s Behind The Music.

There’s more to Walk The Line, though, like Johnny and June’s relationship, that does still hold its power and elevates it above, say, Poison’s or MC Hammer’s episode of Behind The Music. A great deal of work was put into showing us the complex make-up of Cash. First you have the terrible relationship with his father, borne out of Johnny’s brother’s early death. This was lampooned in Walk Hard, but terribly so. There’s no comedic source in this tragic relationship, and so it still retains its power as a persistent demon throughout the period of Johnny’s life this film covers.

Next, the scene where Johnny hits rock bottom on stage in Las Vegas is very well done. Despite the clichéd nature of the scene, the actual execution feels fresh, naked, raw, and naturally destructive. It maintains its strength through its uniqueness. Unlike, say, Purple Rain’s “Darling Nikki” scene, the unrequited love of our protagonist is right there on stage with him, creating a dynamic ripe with tension. Furthermore, it’s not a complete blow-up, like in Purple Rain or The Doors, but really just a shutting down, a falling apart and collapse, that says more about Cash’s state at the time than an outrageous outburst would have.

The most touching part of the movie comes, of course, from the Carter family, including June. The Thanksgiving scene (and watch this movie just for this scene), gives us Johnny coasting along at rock bottom, desperately trying to buy himself respect from both the Carters and his parents, with everybody together for the holiday. When he finally confronts his father for his own negligence in his brother’s death, his father’s nastiness reaches new heights (“You ain’t got nothin’”), and Johnny flips and heads out to flip his tractor into the lake. Everybody heads out to leave Johnny alone to struggle, but when June tries to get into the truck with her mother, Maybelle starts to show us the power of redemption through living Christ’s teachings.

Maybelle: You should go down there to him. He’s mixed up.
June: Mama, I am not going down there. If I go down there—
Maybelle: You already are down there, honey.

From there, June and her parents lead us to a beautiful climax when Ma and Pa Carter chase off Johnny’s drug dealer with shotguns. It’s hard to imagine today’s paragons of Christianity reaching out with so much personal involvement to save such a self-destructive soul.

Thanksgiving through Johnny’s recovery are the two most powerful scenes in the movie. However, lovers of music, and in particular the early days of rock and roll, will find their salvation much earlier in the movie, when Johnny is auditioning for Sun Records’ Sam Phillips. Cut short in singing a gospel number, Cash and Phillips engage in a testy exchange, before Phillips so eloquently describes the new way of things and what would matter for the next fifty years. Just read it, as Dallas Roberts, playing Phillips, personifies rock and roll at this moment in time.

We’ve already heard that song, a hundred times, just like that. Just like how you sang it. Let’s bring it home. If you was hit by a truck and you were lying out in that gutter dying and you had time to sing one song. Huh? One song people would remember before you’re dirt. One song that would let God know what you felt about your time here on Earth. One song that would sum you up, you telling me that’s the song you’d sing? That same jimmy davis tune we hear on the radio all day about your peace within and how it’s real and how you’re gonna shout it? or would you sing something different? Something real. Something you felt, ‘cuz I’m telling you right now, that’s the kind of song people wanna hear. That’s the song that truly saves people. It ain’t got nothin’ to do with believin’ in God, Mr. Cash. It has to do with believin’ in yourself.

Every American musician should be required to watch that monologue before every single performance they give. Heck, I’d be in favor of the damn thing taking the place of the pledge of allegiance. I tear up near the end of it every time, and if there were an Oscar for Best Monologue about Music and Life, Dallas Roberts would have easily won the 2006 award.

Of course, the movie’s not all awesomeness from start to finish. Besides not being able to avoid the clichés of the drug-fueled breakdown, Walk The Line’s most notable weakness is its inability to capture Cash’s voice. Of course it’s an impossible task to do so, and it’s really unfair to criticize the film for failing to deliver the impossible, but Phoenix’ imitation of Cash’s voice falls notably short in most scenes and requires the viewer to really let go of all expectations about what they should be hearing in front of Cash’s music. Witherspoon, on the other hand, sounds great. Her voice doesn’t sound quite as powerful as Carter’s, but it’s still fantastic and, as wonderful as Carter was, those are much easier vocal shoes to fill.

This is the Extended Cut, as the regular version of the DVD has obviously been out for some time. If you want to know more about Cash and the history behind the songs in the movie, the introductions to the extended musical sequences provide some valuable information. If you really want to know more about Cash’s life and music, though, you may just be better off reading Cash’s two autobiographies, Man In Black and Cash, upon which the movie was based. The deleted scenes were, as usual, deleted for good reason. Mangold’s director commentary was enlightening, but only about half of it was necessary. Other than that, the special features tend to be a lot of Behind the Music-style, quick-cut commentary from Cash’s contemporaries and current stars about how genuine, honest, genuine, real, true, and genuine Cash was.

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Tags: movie reviews

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