Review of Walk the Line (2005) by Sara M — 06 Jul 2011

A Johnny Cash biopic, doing the old biopic trick of making the hero horribly dislikeable.

It has a bizarre style. A strange sugarcoated, rose-tinted depiction of a man who is set up throughout as utterly repulsive. The entire film appears to be saying, 'yes, he's horrible, look how horrible he is, doesn't matter though.' He's a drug-abusing Lothario; he's hopelessly cruel to his wife Vivian, attacking her in front of their three children, at which point she promptly drops out of the film and he's creepy, stalkerish and threatening to supposed romantic interest June Carter despite her not seeming to like him. This just piles on to the depiction of Cash's bad side, never hinting at a positive side. Yet the film seems to like him.

Walk The Line assumes the audience is already familiar with Cash and need only highlight certain events for them to go, "Ahh, yes, that," which doesn't help if you know nothing about the man. We never get to see why, how or if Cash is so famous. Joaquin Phoenix plays Cash as a simpleton, so that I assumed Cash had a learning disability, but this is never mentioned, and having seen some of Phoenix's other films, I'm beginning to think it's just his acting.

And then there's the terrible, guffaw-inducing dialogue.

A poorly constructed story that did nothing for me, other than make me dislike and slightly fear Cash. What's all the hype about?