FINAL CUT: Here Comes the Man in Black

Probably the most bizarre double feature I've ever created for myself at the theater was the one that developed a few years ago, when we followed up a screening of Chicken Run with a viewing of Samuel L. Jackson's take on Shaft. Yes, peas in a pod, those two films. So after that particular brand of cinematic whiplash, there's really nothing all that weird about last Sunday's triple shot of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a second helping of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and a chaser of today's discussion topic: Walk the Line.

I don't know if biographical pictures about recently deceased music legends constitutes a trend. Walk the Line, director James Mangold's take on the life of Johnny Cash, follows closely on the heels of last year's hit Ray. In many respects, the two pictures are unsettlingly similar. They begin in the rural South, feature protagonists whose brothers die when they are very young, and introduce the elder versions of their main character waiting for a bus. There's drug abuse, leading to run-ins with the law. There's cheating on a marriage. There's a record label that doesn't want our hero to put out the record they want to make. It's all here. You might be forgiven for thinking that there's a certain Mad Lib quality to this. "Okay, I need the name of a music legend." "Sam Cooke!" "Excellent. Roll cameras!"

Perhaps the most dramatic similarity is the unexpected casting in the crucial lead role. Ray, of course, won Jamie Foxx an Oscar for his uncanny re-creation of Ray Charles. Yet somehow, the makers of Walk the Line have managed to come up with even more unorthodox pick for their version of Johnny Cash: Joaquin Phoenix.

Phoenix is an actor I'm psychologically-pre-disposed to dislike. Ever since his Oscar-nominated (!) performance in Gladiator, in which he utters the most idiotic piece of dialogue in film since the entire script of Basic Instinct (to wit: "He vexes me. I'm very vexed."), my gut reaction is to wince when he comes onscreen. This is terribly unfair, since he has done some fine work, including his lackadaisical brother in Signs and his nicely understand vocal turn in Brother Bear. But casting him as Johnny Cash is another thing entirely. Cash looms large in stature and legend. The memory conjures up a big statue of a man, with a confident swagger, whereas as Phoenix seems small, sometimes even sniveling. How is it possible to find any kind of common ground between these two men?

In The Birdcage, one of that film's more successful jokes lies in Robin Williams' attempt to make Nathan Lane appear more masculine. After suggesting that he walk like John Wayne, Lane responds with an exaggerated lope that suggests a man walking in Jello while twirling a hula hoop. Williams is dumbstruck, saying, "I just never knew he walked like that."

I can think of no better way to describe Phoenix's remarkable performance in this movie. He really doesn't look the part, and almost never makes you forget that you're watching a performance. But there is something unmistakably true about his take on Cash. He's not the statue, and he's not a replica. He's a reminder that Johnny Cash was, after all, a real human being, and Phoenix presents a very believable picture of the flesh & blood version of the icon. It's a very successful dare.

A big factor in his favor is that Phoenix, along with all the other performers, does his own singing. It's not as much of a stretch as it seems; Johnny Cash was not known for his melodious singing voice. Phoenix does a credible interpretation of Cash's cavern-deep voice and its train-track cadence. But the difference is in the acting. Freed from the need to follow a pre-recorded track, Phoenix gets to inhabit the role any way he pleases. This cuts both ways; Sinead O'Connor's lip-synched video for "Nothing Compares 2 U" is legendary for the raw emotion it conveys. But there's no question that allowing the actors in Walk the Line to sing for themselves lends an air of realism and credibility that other musical biographies can't achieve.

In a way, all this talk of Johnny Cash and Joaquin Phoenix is unfair. Although Reese Witherspoon doesn't make her first appearance as June Carter until well into the first hour, her character has already been introduced, and the picture as a whole is chronicling a couple, not just one man. Witherspoon has a stronger part than most of her films allow her, and she takes full advantage of the opportunity. In many respects, she is a more confident than Cash, and even if we're not always sure what she sees in him, there can be no doubt what he sees in her. She's a crucial counterpoint to Phoenix, and unlike many a filmed love story, their relationship seems fated, rather than dictated by the script.

Walk the Line is a very good movie, as these things go. Perhaps the highest praise I can give it is to say that I feel certain it is a better film than Ray. What that film had to sell was the strong performance of Jamie Foxx. Beyond that, it definitely felt like marking milestones in a life, and then looking for a place to stop. By comparison, Walk the Line actually has a story to tell, an arc to chart. It doesn't always avoid cliché, but it makes what might be a familiar story work, and never fails to be convincing. Over the closing credits, we hear the real Johnny and June for the first time, in a performance of "Long-Legged Guitar-Pickin' Man". Many times, when a film shows us "the real people" for the first time, the contrast is shocking, undoing so much of the construction the film has struggled to build for two hours. (The end of Nixon is an excellent example of the phenomenon.) But Mr. & Mrs. Cash don't contradict the film of their lives. If anything, they help bolster the idea that the film got it pretty close to right. Which is appropriate for a film about musicians. It's harmony.