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November 28
It’s a tradition in my extended family that we go to a movie on Thanksgiving Day evening.
Usually we see something scary. This year we went to see Walk the Line.
My dad would have enjoyed this one. When I was growing up there were a handful of singers that my dad liked that I liked too. Johnny Cash was one of them. But I only ever saw the Johnny Cash that existed after the time frame of this movie. Much of his earlier life and career had remained a mystery to me.
Walk the Line is not a biography, but from all that can find to read it comers very close to a real and accurate portrayal. It offers glimpses into Cash’s “former” self that made him, as a Christian later on, a humble and gracious man.
I had read that Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon did their own singing and playing. I had heard that making this moving was terribly difficult for each of them.
Going in I had had an easier time imagining Phoenix as Johnny Cash than Witherspoon as June Carter. But they each delivered fantastic performances, and should each get Oscar nominations, if not Oscars.
I came to deep appreciation of Johnny Cash late in the game, after his release of American IV: When the Man Comes Around about the time of his death. This was his last recording effort. The first song off that record, his own When the Man Comes Around speaks about the coming back of Jesus Christ in a way that still gives me goose bumps.
But it is the next song, his rendition of the Nine Inch Nail song Hurt, that turns those goose bumps quickly into tears. If you have not yet seen the music video of that song, I’m just telling you straight out, you should. It was recently named by an esteemed group of artists as the best music video ever made. You can find it here.
Anyway, there are many scenes in the Hurt video that I never understood. Having seen the movie the video makes a lot more sense.
Back to the actors. I had heard the Cash/Carter duet of the song Jackson from the CD Folsom Prison. June Carter was a great performer, and had a great voice, and I just had a hard time separating Reese Witherspoon from Legally Blond. And though I had heard that both Witherspoon and Phoenix had worked hard on their voices, it was just hard to imagine. But as good as the rest of the movie is, it is the two of them on stage, Phoenix and Witherspoon as Cash and Carter, that has me wanting to go back and see the movie again, and maybe again after that. They just had this chemistry, and energy, and the camera and sound work was amazing.
I knew so little about Cash’s childhood, his awful father, the death of his brother, his mother’s singing, the cotton fields, the flood, the first recording session, his tours with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison and Waylon Jennings, his failed first marriage, his decade of addiction, the decade of on-stage-only relationship with June Carter, the spiral downward, his embrace by the Carter clan, his on-stage proposal to June Carter…All these things had happened already by the time me and my dad were watching Johnny Cash on TV in the very late 60’s and early 70’s.
Johnny Cash, the one we all were more familiar with, the one who had the 35 year career post drugs and after marriage to June Carter, was a deep and profound Christian man and artist. He was very open about his flaws, even about his regrets, mistakes, and sins. He apparently knew all too well that he was a big sinner saved by Another, as is made clear in the Hurt video. He knew all his great achievements were as filthy rags.
But I didn’t understand that very well about him, and now I understand it better. I thank the makers of this movie for the honest and revealing peek into this man and woman’s past, a past little known and little understood by most of us. And I thank Johnny Cash for his blessing upon this project, a project that he knew would reveal unsavory things about him. That in itself speaks volumes.
Joel Gillespie
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