USA: Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon star in Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line".

Playing the legendary Man in Black, Joaquin Phoenix displays a surprisingly good voice and the ability to imitate Johnny Cash's deep bass in "Walk the Line," the story of his incredible life . A shy man who cultivated an outlaw image and sang of hard-luck lives in hard-living songs, he took the stage with a stony face and a guitar aimed at the audience. Although Phoenix doesn't look much like Johnny, he gets his stage persona. "I was nervous to play Johnny -- he is loved and respected by so many and was a legend and expectations were so high. We really wanted to to tell this story as accurately and authentically as possible and is was a tall order," Phoenix said. As his second wife, singer June Carter, Reese Witherspoon delivers a performance as a woman who must temper her passion with an unwillingness to witness her man's self-destruction. "To research June, I bought every book available and every video and went through country music catalogues and spoke to country music historians and different people that knew her. I tried to get a certain idea of who she was on stage and who she was off stage," Witherspoon said. James Mangold's movie, too, has its rewards as it manages to skirt many of the usual dangers of any truthful look at a legend, especially a musical one. "Well he reached a peak in '68 with his battle with drugs and his battle with his own demons, the kind of guilt he felt in his relationship with his father and of course his relationship with June. All these things, and to his art, all came to a peak in 1968. He did the greatest concert of his life and one of the most popular albums of all time with his live concert at Folsom Prison. He also proposed to June Carter, he also kicked drugs. I mean it was a kind of concentration. I mean the key when you are going to put a real life in a movie the key is how much are you going to have to distort it or bend it in order make it work as a two hour dramatic film and in many ways I did not have to really bend or twist this life at all because it was so concentrated in these years all these incredible changes that happened for him," Mangold said. Witherspoon gets the humour and honesty as well as the resonant voice of the scrappy performing daughter of country music's first family. "The musical element of it was the most challenging just learning how to sing and play and the instruments the was probably the most terrifying part of it," Witherspoon said. The movie follows Johnny's life from the cotton fields of Arkansas in the 1940s to his celebrated performance at Folsom Prison in 1968, which produced a best-selling live album. That span includes his pill-popping and groupie-cuddling days but stops before his born-again conversion in the 1970s. The movie rushes through his Army service, first marriage and failed jobs to get to the fateful moment when Johnny walks through the door of Sun Studios in Memphis in 1955. "In some sense it was juggling all these different emotions he went through such a roller coaster emotionally throughout his life. The fact that in some sense these 15 years are condensed into 2 hours of film time and 10 weeks of shooting was I think was difficult. To jump from 1967 and turn around and shoot something that was in 1954 that was difficult for me," Phoenix explained. The movie concentrates on the blossoming relationship between Johnny and June which establishes a strong and enduring friendship between the two. "Walk the Line" -- a title drawn from Johnny's song about the difficulties of avoiding temptation while married -- is essentially a romance about a couple who are alone together only onstage. Given the late singer's huge influence on music -- on folk, rock, country and punk -- and the smoothness of this particular production, it's hard to see why there won't be long lines at the box offices for "Walk the Line which opens November 18 in the U.S."

ITN Source | November 23, 2005

Tags:. .johnnys. .married. .emotions. .emotionally. .passion