Walk the Line is frank enough about the fact of Cash's alcoholism and drug addiction, but it adopts an unnuanced sympathy that prevents us from seeing the man straight—as an adult responsible for the messes he gets into, whether he knows it or not. June Carter, the level-headed, down-home singer Cash courts on- and offstage for a decade, sure knows it, but the movie isn't wired to her practicality. The script hints at the immaturity of Cash's fantasies about being a criminal in prison, for instance, but then presents his concert in Folsom Prison (memorialized in a 1968 album) as a heroic morale-booster for the mistreated inmates. (June sang "Jackson" with Johnny at the concert, but the movie doesn't show us her reaction when he jokingly acts out the lyrics to another song by pretending to shoot a woman with his guitar.) There's something adolescent and slack-minded—and generic—about Walk the Line's emphasis on Cash's travails, which are the same as in every other boozy-loser biopic because they haven't been fitted to a complex enough framework, either psychological or dramatic. June is what's different here, and the moviemakers never figure out how to get their narrative with her program. She ends up looking on in dismay like all the other wives of geniuses in the movies. And yet …
Joaquin Phoenix plays Cash with a molten excitement entirely missing from Hoffman's portrayal of Capote. The difference between Hoffman's and Phoenix's performances doesn't have to do only with the difference between Capote and Cash; Capote was a turbulent enough character in his own right, God knows. Phoenix is an intelligent actor but unlike Hoffman he's a fully—mesmerizingly—instinctual one, too. When he goes at a song, he uses his jaw like a shovel as if to dig down into himself to express more than the yokel-doggerel lyrics are capable of expressing in themselves. Phoenix can't make lyric art of Cash's songs, but he can make performance art of the moment in which he sings them.
Phoenix couldn't know all that's going on in his face in certain sequences—it can be as eerily changeable as a special effect. (Hoffman always knows.) Phoenix maintains no distance from Cash; we know that the stunted boy's counterproductive rage to become a man is an interpretation, but the actor embodies it as if it were a visitation. Walk the Line is all performance, if it's anything. And it comes close to being nothing—it continually gets in the way of its star with clumsily calculated points that the audience has already absorbed. Considering Phoenix's power as an actor, however, you may be grateful for what you get. (He just keeps getting better, and I though he was already phenomenal when I wrote about him in my review of The Village last year.)
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Fine delineation of the distinction between instinctive acting and method acting. I'm assuming here that Hoffman is in some form a method actor
Vikram (?) did a documentary on In Cold Blood a couple of years back. Have you seen that?
2 - Alan Dale
Hey Aaman,
Thanks for the comment. Hoffman doesn't strike me as a Method actor, exactly, in the Brando mold. He seems more methodical than Method, doing the work from the outside in as much as the inside out. He's very good, but lacks the detachment, the point, the high-style flair of other obvious actors, like John Malkovich, for instance.
I haven't seen that documentary--do you know the name or any other identifying info?
3 - Aaman
Ah, I was mixing up James Ellroy and Truman Capote - the filmmaker is Vikram Jayanti and the documentary is James Ellroy's Feast Of Death