| Walk the Line | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | James Mangold |
| Screenplay by |
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| Based on | Man in Black: His Own Story in His Own Words andCash: The Autobiography byJohnny Cash |
| Produced by | |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Phedon Papamichael |
| Edited by | Michael McCusker |
| Music by | T Bone Burnett |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
Release dates |
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Running time | 136 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $28 million[1] |
| Box office | $186.8 million[1] |
Walk the Line is a 2005 Americanbiographicaldrama film directed byJames Mangold. The screenplay, written by Mangold andGill Dennis, is based on two autobiographies by the American singer-songwriterJohnny Cash:Man in Black: His Own Story in His Own Words (1975) andCash: The Autobiography (1997). The film follows Cash's early life, his romance with the singerJune Carter, his ascent in the country music scene, and hisdrug addiction. It starsJoaquin Phoenix as Cash,Reese Witherspoon as Carter,Ginnifer Goodwin as Cash's first wifeVivian Liberto, andRobert Patrick as Cash's father.
Walk the Line premiered at theTelluride Film Festival on September 4, 2005, and was theatrically released by20th Century Fox on November 18. It received positive reviews and was abox office success, grossing $187 million on a $28 million budget. At the78th Academy Awards, Witherspoon wonBest Actress while the film was also nominated forBest Actor (Phoenix),Best Sound Mixing,Best Costume Design andBest Film Editing.
The film begins in 1968 withJohnny Cash performing atFolsom State Prison. As the audience of inmates cheer him on, Cash waits backstage near a table saw, which reminds him of his early life. Two decades earlier, in 1944, 12-year-old Johnny is raised on a cotton farm in Dyess, Arkansas, with his brother Jack, his abusive father Ray, his mother Carrie, and his two sisters. One day, Jack is killed in a sawmill accident while Johnny is out fishing. Ray blames Johnny for Jack's death, saying that the Devil "took the wrong son". In 1950, Johnny enlists in the U.S. Air Force and is stationed in West Germany. While there, he purchases a guitar and finds solace in writing songs, including "Folsom Prison Blues", which he develops in 1952.
After his discharge from the military in 1954, Johnny returns to the United States and marries his girlfriend, Vivian Liberto. The couple moves to Memphis, Tennessee, where Cash works as a door-to-door salesman to support his growing family, but with little success. One day, Johnny walks past a recording studio and is inspired to form a band to play gospel music. He and his band audition for Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, and Phillips signs them after they play "Folsom Prison Blues." The band tours asJohnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, along with other rising starsElvis Presley,Carl Perkins,Roy Orbison andJerry Lee Lewis.
Johnny meets country music singer and songwriterJune Carter while on tour and is immediately smitten. He tries to woo her, but she gently rebuffs his attempts. Despite this, they become friends. As Johnny grows up, he begins abusing drugs and alcohol, and over the objections of Vivian, he persuades June to go on tour with him. The tour is a success, but backstage, Vivian becomes critical of June's influence over Johnny. After one performance inLas Vegas, Johnny and June sleep together. The next morning, June notices Johnny taking pills and begins to doubt her choice to be with him. At their concert that evening, Johnny is upset by June's apparent rejection and behaves erratically, eventually passing out on stage. June is upset with Johnny's behavior and decides to dispose of his drugs. She begins to write "Ring of Fire" as a way to describe her feelings for him and the pain she feels as she watches him descend into addiction.
After returning toCalifornia, Johnny travels toMexico to purchase more drugs and is arrested. Soon after, Johnny's marriage to Vivian implodes; they divorce, and he moves to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1966. Johnny buys a large house near a lake in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in an attempt to reconcile with June. Ray and other members of the extended Carter family arrive forThanksgiving, where Ray and Johnny get into an argument, and June's mother urges June to help Johnny. Johnny goes into detox and awakens next to June, who says they have been given a second chance. They begin a tentative relationship, but June resists Cash's marriage proposals.
Later, Johnny records analbum live at Folsom Prison after discovering that most of his fan mail is from prisoners. The performance is a success, and Johnny embarks on a tour with June and his band. At the end of the film, Johnny invites June to join him for a duet but stops in the middle of the song and tells her that he can't sing "Jackson" anymore unless she agrees to marry him. June accepts, and they share a passionate embrace on stage. Later, Johnny and his father reconcile their relationship while they are with their families.
The film has its origins in a1993 episode ofDr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.[2] That year, Johnny Cash was a guest star on the show, where he and June Carter became friends withJane Seymour, the star of the show, and Seymour's ex-husbandJames Keach who was directing the episode. By the mid-1990s, Cash had asked Keach to make a film of his life; he and Seymour began the process with a series of interviews.[2] In 1997, the interviews had been the basis of a screenplay written byGill Dennis, with input from Keach; two years later, still lacking any studio interest, Keach contactedJames Mangold, who had been "angling to become involved in the project for two years."[2] Mangold and his wife, producerCathy Konrad, developed the script forSony Pictures, and by 2001, they had a script they thought they couldpitch to a studio. Sony and others turned it down, butFox 2000 Pictures agreed to make the film.[2]
The film was in part based on two autobiographies, both of which wereoptioned:Man in Black (1975) andCash: The Autobiography (1997), though the film "burrows deep into painful territory that Mr. Cash barely explored."[2]
Joaquin Phoenix met Cash months before hearing about the film. When Phoenix read the script, he felt there were at least ten other actors who would be better in the role.[3] All of Cash's vocal tracks in the film and on the accompanying soundtrack are played and sung by Phoenix.[4] To prepare for her role as June Carter, Reese Witherspoon studied videos of the singer; she also listened to her singing and telling stories to get her voice right.[5]
Walk the Line was released on November 18, 2005, in 2,961 theaters, grossing$22.3 million on its opening weekend behindHarry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It went on to earn $119.5 million in North America and $66.9 million in the rest of the world for a total of $186.4 million, well above its $28 million budget, making it a box office success.[6] It was the all-time highest-grossing music biopic untilStraight Outta Compton surpassed it in 2015.
Walk the Line has an approval rating of 83% on thereview aggregator websiteRotten Tomatoes based on 208 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads: "Superior acting and authentic crooning capture the emotional subtleties of the legend of Johnny Cash with a freshness that is a pleasure to watch."[7]Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 72 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[8] Audiences polled byCinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[9]
Roger Ebert praised Witherspoon for her "boundless energy" and predicted that she would win theAcademy Award for Best Actress. Regarding Phoenix, Ebert wrote: "Knowing Johnny Cash's albums more or less by heart, I closed my eyes to focus on the soundtrack and decided that, yes, that was the voice of Johnny Cash I was listening to. The closing credits make it clear it's Joaquin Phoenix doing the singing, and I was gob-smacked."[10][11] In her review for theLos Angeles Times, Carina Chocano wrote: "Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon do first-rate work – they sing, they twang, they play new-to-them instruments, they crackle with wit and charisma, and they give off so much sexual heat it's a wonder they don't burst into flames."[12]
A. O. Scott, in his review forThe New York Times, had problems with Phoenix's performance: "Even though his singing voice doesn't match the original – how could it? – he is most convincing in concert when his shoulders tighten and he cocks his head to one side. Otherwise, he seems stuck in the kind of off-the-rack psychological straitjacket in which Hollywood likes to confine troubled geniuses."[13] In his review forTime,Richard Corliss wrote: "A lot of credit for Phoenix's performance has to go to Mangold, who has always been good at finding the bleak melodrama in taciturn souls ... If Mangold's new movie has a problem, it's that he and co-screenwriter Gill Dennis sometimes walk the lines of the inspirational biography too rigorously."[14]
Andrew Sarris, in his review forThe New York Observer, praised Witherspoon for her "spine-tingling feistiness", and wrote: "This feat has belatedly placed it (in my mind, at least) among a mere handful of more-than-Oscar-worthy performances this year."[15] He also ranked the film as number seven on his top films list of 2005 and Witherspoon as the best female performance of the year.[16]Owen Gleiberman ofEntertainment Weekly gave the film a "B+" rating and wrote: "While Witherspoon, a fine singer herself, makes Carter immensely likable, a fountain of warmth and cheer, given how sweetly she meshes with Phoenix her romantic reticence isn't filled in."[17]The Baltimore Sun contributorMichael Sragow wrote: "What Phoenix and Witherspoon accomplish in this movie is transcendent. They act with every bone and inch of flesh and facial plane, and each tone and waver of their voice. They do their singing with a startling mastery of country music's narrative musicianship."[18] In his review forSight & Sound,Mark Kermode wrote: "Standing ovations, too, for Witherspoon, who has perhaps the tougher task of lending depth and darkness to the role of June, whose frighteningly chipper stage act - a musical-comedy hybrid - constantly courts (but never marries) mockery."[19]David Ansen ofNewsweek ranked Witherspoon as one of the five best actresses of 2005.[20]
Some critics found the film too constrained by Hollywood plot formulas of love and loss, ignoring the last twenty years of Cash's life and other more socio-politically controversial reasons he was considered "the man in black".[21]
Cash's daughter,Rosanne Cash, had mixed feelings about the film. She did not enjoy the "painful" experience of seeing the film, "because it had the three most damaging events of my childhood: my parents' divorce, my father's drug addiction, and something else bad that I can't remember now".[22] Regarding the work of the filmmakers, she said "The three of them [in the film] were not recognizable to me as my parents in any way. But the scenes were recognizable, and the storyline, so the whole thing was fraught with sadness because they all had just died, and I had this resistance to seeing the screen version of my childhood. I don't resent them making it - I thought it was an honorable approach. I loved the filmRay, but I'm sure if you asked Ray Charles's kids, they would tell you, 'Well, that's not exactly how it was...' "[23]
Walk the Line won theGolden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy[24][25] and the North Texas Film Critics Association Award for Best Picture.
For his portrayal ofJohnny Cash, Phoenix won theGolden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy,[24]Hollywood Film Award forActor of the Year, and North Texas Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor. He also received nominations for theAcademy Award for Best Actor,[26]BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role,Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actor,Satellite Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, andScreen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, among others. For his involvement on thefilm's soundtrack, he won theGrammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for Motion Picture, Television, or Other Visual Media, sharing the win withT Bone Burnett (producer) andMike Piersante (engineer/mixer).[27]
For her portrayal ofJune Carter, Witherspoon won theAcademy Award for Best Actress,[26][28]Austin Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress, Awards Circuit Community Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role,BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role,Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress,Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actress,Florida Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress,Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical,[24] Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award for Best Actress,National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress,New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, North Texas Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress, Online Film & Television Association Award for Best Actress,Online Film Critics Society Award for Best Actress,San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress,Satellite Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy,Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role, Utah Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress, andWashington D.C. Area Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress. She was also voted Favorite Leading Actress at the32nd People's Choice Awards.[29]
The film was also nominated for theAcademy Award forBest Costume Design,Best Film Editing, andBest Sound Mixing.[26]
On February 28, 2006, a single-disc DVD and a two-disc collector edition DVD were released; these editions sold three million copies on their first day of release.[30] On March 25, 2008, a two-disc 'extended cut' DVD was released for Region One. The feature on disc one is 17 minutes longer than the theatrical release, and disc two features eight extended musical sequences with introductions and documentaries about the making of the film. The film has been released onBlu-ray Disc in France, Sweden, and the UK in the form of its extended cut. The American Blu-ray features a shorter theatrical cut.
The film was released on a double movie collection DVD pack withRomeo + Juliet in 2010.[31]
Wind-up Records released the soundtrack in November 2005. It featured nine songs performed byJoaquin Phoenix, four songs byReese Witherspoon, two songs byTyler Hilton, and one song each byWaylon Payne,Johnathan Rice, andShooter Jennings. The album received a Grammy at the49th Annual Grammy Awards forBest Compilation Soundtrack Album for Motion Pictures, Television or Other Visual Media.
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