..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Walk The Line

Directed by James Mangold
20th Century Fox

There’s an important distance between complex and complicated, and far too many eyes mistake what is spare for simplistic.

Walk the Line has the thinnest of threads for its John Cash and June Carter Cash to balance upon: blanched to sticks of story, it goes that Mr. Cash has always felt unworthy of anything at all, the death of a beloved brother when a boy, the blessed, golden, worshipful one, leads to a lifetime of scorn from a bitter father and judgmental mother. Brother died; John’s lonely. (It’s Disney’s “What I Want Song” 101.) That’s been the focus of a handful of festival reviews I’ve read and I’ll only bother to call them goofy or dumb, and marvel once more at what different movies we all take in when the lights go down.

There are ten thousand personal reasons I’m left slack-jawed and dewy-eyed at James Mangold’s movie, written with Gill Dennis as well as the extensive cooperation of the late couple. I’m Southern, and grew up rural and poor, and there is a terrible tale of a brother dead too young too close to home. Johnny Cash’s music was ubiquitous when I was growing up, on the turntables of even those who didn’t listen to music. But still, I’d hope this beautiful movie about human love, hope and redemption (with hints of a more spiritual perspective) would have the same hold on others, from the opening scene’s percussion with gliding shots along empty corridors and exercise yards at Folsom prison, Cash’s band vamping so loudly, echoing so much that it might as well be the stamping feet of the excited inmate audience. Cash poises his finger over the teeth of the blade of a table saw, a life on a string, soon to draw taut.

A second viewing will make it easier to talk about these lovely, loving, consummate, fiery, intelligent performances (including the musical moments) by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. Walk the Line is a framework for two forceful personalities to meet and align: John and June, I mean, not Joaquin and Reese. I admire both these actors but they are so good here.

Two visual notes: There’s quiet beauty in a widescreen Winslow Homer-style imagining of a long dirt road to bottomlands when two boys go fishin’, the frame twenty percent earth to eighty percent increasingly dark and roiling sky. Many other frames throughout are slabs of negative space, other vast skies, under-decorated walls, the simplest of brand icons and similar touchstones, the hints in memory rather that explosions of “production value.”

The households of women I grew up around had a thousand locutions and hundreds of euphemisms, but there is one Walk the Line leaves me with. To say “I swear” would still be an oath against the Lord as foul as “I swear to God” and worse that gets you a PG rating, so they’d just marvel at a moment of ridiculous or glorious human attainment, wide-eyed at it all with a breathy, “Well, I swan!”

Walk the Line? I swan.

Mangold, who talks a smart game, was a student of the late Alexander Mackendrick, director of The Sweet Smell of Success and mentor to many in a lengthy teaching career at Cal Arts. (His just-published ”On Film-making”is an indispensable volume drawn from 20 years of directing experience.) He’s always said he wants a long career, and after the commercial success of Identity and the likely honors for I Walk the Line, that seems assured. (When he and I spoke in late 2001, Mangold told me, “You can become a hack, where you're just out to make money, which is not what I'm about, or else you can become someone who's out to redefine the medium with every picture. I don't think either one is useful. John Ford made a jillion movies. Alfred Hitchcock made 36 movies before he was Alfred Hitchcock. Anyway, I'm happily on the long road. I always figure the turtle might win the race.”)

- Ray Pride