Walk the Line hits right note

Sam Phillips didn’t want to hear the same old gospel song sung the same old way that day at Sun Records recording studio in Memphis. He interrupted a nervous John R. Cash in mid-audition and told him he wouldn’t record songs he couldn’t sell and, anyway, he said, “I don’t believe you.”

That March 1955 audition was a pivotal moment in American music history and it’s a pivotal moment in “Walk the Line.” In the movie, Phillips tells Cash to play something like he really means it, something that sums up everything he feels about being a man in this world full of joy and pain.

“That’s the kind of song that saves people,” Phillips says.

Cash slides into his own composition, “Folsom Prison Blues,” haltingly at first, then steadied by Marshall Perkins’ bass and sharpened by Luther Perkins’ classic guitar riff. Cash has found his artistic voice and “Walk the Line” has hit its pace.

It’s a frantic one as Cash rises to stardom on a sound “steady like a train and sharp like a razor.” The lifestyle immediately begins to break apart Cash’s family; his wife Vivian never understood the draw of the music and only wanted a normal, suburban life that Cash was unequipped to provide.

From here “Walk the Line” focuses on the great romance of Cash and June Carter, a daughter of the “First Family of Country Music,” a spunky, sassy girl of limited vocal talent but great showmanship.

The pair, both married, are inexorably drawn to each other. It was, at least for June, an attraction fraught with fear and danger. First there is the fear of censure from a culture that frowns on divorce and already sees her as a kind of fallen woman.

Then there is the sensible fear of falling in love with a man who is steadily destroying himself on an amphetamine-fueled rampage through life.

Not for nothing did Carter liken falling in love with Cash to falling into a “Ring of Fire.”

“Walk the Line” is unflinching in its depiction of Cash’s savage addiction. At times, his frantic sweating, shaking rages are hard to watch.

Joaquin Phoenix captures the dark charisma of Johnny Cash with all its rage and hurt. The loss of his brother to a sawmill accident in their youth and his estrangement from his father who cries out that “God took the wrong son!” simmer just below the surface in a smoldering performance that goes well beyond mimicking the mannerisms and sound of an iconic figure.

Phoenix has won well-deserved critical acclaim for his work in “Walk the Line.” Yet it is Reese Witherspoon’s characterization of June Carter that holds the film together, much as Carter held Cash together in reality.

Her performance captures all the longing, love and fear that kept the couple together yet apart for years, depicting a woman of much greater character and depth than her stage persona as a “loud-mouthed woman” with a big smile and funny hillbilly dance steps ever let on.

There’s no Hollywood moment of triumph as Cash overcomes his addiction and records the smash hit “Live at Folsom Prison” in 1968. Witherspoon holds Carter’s ambivalence and fear right through Cash’s on-stage marriage proposal, making it clear that she knows this is no happy ending.

And indeed, we know as the film ends in 1968 that there will be more peaks and valleys ahead for Cash. Instead of triumph, there is a sense of survival, a knowledge that all the loss and pain and self-destructive madness can be made to mean something.

A sense that Cash has truly learned that his kind of song is the kind of song that saves people.

“Walk the Line” runs through December 8 at Sisters Movie House. Check http://www.sistersmoviehouse.com for show times.

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.

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