The film begins in 1968 with Johnny Cash performing at Folsom State Prison. As the audience of inmates cheered him on, Cash waited backstage near a table saw. The saw reminded him of his early life. Two decades earlier, in 1944, 12-year-old Johnny was 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 was killed in a sawmill accident while Johnny was out fishing. Ray blamed Johnny for Jack's death, saying that the Devil "took the wrong son". In 1950, Johnny Cash enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and was stationed in West Germany. While there, he purchased a guitar and found solace in writing songs, including "Folsom Prison Blues" which he developed in 1952. After his discharge from the military in 1954, Johnny Cash returned to the United States and married his girlfriend, Vivian Liberto. The couple moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where Cash worked as a door-to-door salesman to support his growing family, but with little success. One day, Johnny Cash was walking past a recording studio when he was inspired to form a band to play gospel music. He and his band auditioned for Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records. Phillips signed them after they played "Folsom Prison Blues." The band then toured as Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, along with other rising stars Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Johnny Cash meets country music singer and songwriter June 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 grew up, he begins abusing drugs and alcohol. Johnny Cash persuades June Carter to go on tour with him, over the objections of Johnny's manager, Vivian Liberto. The tour is a success, but backstage Vivian becomes critical of June's influence over Johnny. After one performance in Las 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. He eventually passes 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 to California, Johnny Cash traveled to Mexico to purchase more drugs. He was arrested, and his marriage to Vivian imploded. They divorced, and he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1966. Johnny Cash buys a large house near a lake in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in an attempt to reconcile with his wife, June Carter Cash. Ray, Johnny's father, and other members of the extended Carter family arrive for Thanksgiving. Ray and Johnny get into an argument, and June's mother urges June to help Cash. Cash 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. Johnny Cash performs "I Got Stripes" on stage. The song is so powerful that it causes Johnny to collapse on stage, accompanied by June Carter. Johnny Cash recorded an album live at Folsom Prison after discovering that most of his fan mail was from prisoners. The performance was a success, and Johnny embarked on a tour with June and his band. He later performed "Ring of Fire" on stage. At the end of the film, Johnny Cash invites June Carter to join him for a duet. He 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 a 1993 episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.[2] That year, Cash was a guest star on the show, where he and June Carter became friends with Jane Seymour, the star of the show, and Seymour's ex-husband James 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 by Gill Dennis, with input from Keach; two years later, still lacking any studio interest, Keach contacted James Mangold, who had been "angling to become involved in the project for two years."[2] Mangold and his wife, producer Cathy Konrad, developed the script for Sony, and by 2001, they had a script they thought they could pitch to a studio. Sony and others turned it down, but Fox 2000 agreed to make the film.[2]
The film was in part based on two autobiographies, both of which were optioned: Man in Black (1975) and Cash: The Autobiography (1997), though the film "burrows deep into painful territory that Mr. Cash barely explored."[2]
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, Witherspoon studied videos of the singer; she also listened to her singing and telling stories to get her voice right.[5]
Release
Walk the Line was released on November 18, 2005, in 2,961 theaters, grossing $22.3 million on its opening weekend behind Harry 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 until Straight Outta Compton surpassed it in 2015.
Reception
Critical response
The performances of Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon received widespread critical acclaim, with critics describing Witherspoon's performance as her best work to date. Both earned Academy Award nominations for Best Actor and Best Actress respectively, with Witherspoon winning her category.
Walk the Line has an approval rating of 82% on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 210 reviews, with an average rating of 7.20/10. 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 by CinemaScore 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 the Academy 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 the Los 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 for The 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 for Time, 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 for The 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 of Entertainment 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 really filled in."[17]The Baltimore Sun contributor Michael 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 own singing with a startling mastery of country music's narrative musicianship."[18] In his review for Sight & 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 of Newsweek 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 film Ray, but I'm sure if you asked Ray Charles's kids, they would tell you, "Well, that's not exactly how it was..."[23]
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 on Blu-ray Disc in France, Sweden, and the UK in the form of its extended cut. The American Blu-ray features a shorter theatrical cut.
