Walk the Line
WaPo has a great piece about Reese Witherspoon and Walk the Line. I'm greatly looking forward to seeing this movie, though I dread what appears to be a whitewashing of Johnny Cash's miserable treatment of his first wife and/or glorifying of his metaphysically-bigamous relationship with June Carter.
Witherspoon has ventured into deeper, darker waters in her turn as country music legend June Carter Cash, starring opposite Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a tormented Man in Black in "Walk the Line," which opens nationwide Friday.
It is a most unusual love story of a most unusual couple -- unusual in the sense that the two lovers come off as friends and soul mates more than hot bed partners. Though some of his rougher edges are sanded down, the film tells of the reckless genius of Johnny Cash as he rose from the Arkansas cotton fields to the Grand Ole Opry and of the twice-married mother he vowed to have as his own, June Carter, a daughter of the first family of country music.
June was the woman, Cash wrote in his 1997 autobiography, "who could see the kernel of me, deep inside, beneath the drugs and deceit and despair and anger and selfishness, and knew my loneliness." It was June who saved him, when Cash was just "leather and bone, nothing in my blood but amphetamines."
Mrs. Cash, of course, had her passions, too. Remember it was June, not Johnny, who wrote their love song "Ring of Fire" ("I fell for you like a child, oh, but the fire went wild . . . and it burns, burns, burns. ") The movie is generating early Oscar buzz, especially the performances of Phoenix and Witherspoon, who not only play the country music royals but sing the hit songs themselves. . .
Their son, John Carter Cash, 35 and an executive producer of the film, says of June and Johnny, "I know they're up there, and they couldn't be happier." Before the couple died, he says, they approved of early drafts of the script and the casting of Witherspoon and Phoenix. "It's a very true thing," Carter says. "My father was lost. He had exhausted and hurt all those around him, but he found God through my mother. My mother was the door to his salvation. The message is the light. Not the darkness." Witherspoon, he says, "took on the role with a full heart and plays it with reverence and style and I know my mother would have loved it." . . .
The article ends with mawkish spirituality, but it's still interesting:
And it was weird, Witherspoon whispers. "It fit perfectly." She remembers walking through the couple's home on a lake outside Hendersonville, Tenn. The two had just died -- June in May of 2003, Johnny four months later. "She had closets full of furs. I'll never forget it. She just loved fur. Closets full of antique instruments. Mandolins, autoharps, guitars. Hundreds of them in beautiful condition, properly restored."
Could Witherspoon still feel their presence?
"So much of the time playing that part I felt her energy. I know that sounds hokey-pokey. She shepherded me through it. I'm not terribly involved in things like ghosts. It really felt like she was there. A feeling of guidance and support. Of overseeing. Things come into your life for a reason. There has to be some kind of destiny to it."
Like, why?
Think about it, she says: She is asked to play June Carter at the age that Witherspoon is now. They're from the same city. "And I have studied that person and know that family and studied that music." She played Mother Maybelle Carter in a school play. "What is the likelihood of all those things aligning? Some of it has to be destiny. That it's fated. Or maybe it's my own idea that I wanted her to condone it. I definitely felt it. Then when I finished, it was gone."
