Line celebrates Cash as rebel, not believer
By Peter T. Chattaway
HE SANG gospel songs, but he also wrote darker tunes - like the one in which he assumed the persona of a man who shot someone "just to watch him die." He was a country star who found his greatest success after he teamed with a producer of rap albums. He produced a haunting music video shortly before his death at 70, which offered a stark, unflinching look at human mortality - yet earned him a lot of fans many years his junior on MTV.
Johnny Cash was a man of contradictions, and those contradictions are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the way his Christian and secular fans have claimed his life story.
I grew up in the 1970s, and my first impression of Cash was of his ardent faith. It was there in The Gospel Road, a musical life-of-Jesus movie he produced the same year Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell came out; and it was there in the Spire comic book Hello, I'm Johnny Cash, in which he shared his I-once-was-lost-but-now-am-found testimony.
The comic book, illustrated by Al Hartley (who also wrote many Christian Archie comics), begins with Johnny Cash's famous Folsom Prison concert in 1968, and it portrays the concert as something uplifting and inspiring. Walk the Line - the new Johnny Cash biopic written and directed by James Mangold, who developed the project with the Man in Black prior to his death in 2003 - also begins there, but it emphasizes Cash's rebel spirit.
To those who, like me, grew up with Cash the Christian and have never been big enough country fans to check out the rest of his story, Walk the Line is an eye-opener - but also a bit of a disappointment. The film covers Cash's early years - from his childhood in the 1940s, with an alcoholic father and a righteous brother who died too young; to his days playing alongside Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley; and all the way through his battle with drugs in the 1960s. But it ends right at the point where Cash came back to God.
In addition, the film is eager to play up the romance between Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) and June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), who eventually married in 1968 and were famously committed to one another until their deaths two years ago. There's just one problem with this: one or both of them are married to other people throughout most of the story.
Well, if that's what happened, then that's what happened. The difficulty here lies in the way these facts are poured into a pre-existing romantic-movie formula. The filmmakers and their audience regard the union of Johnny and June as a happy inevitability. As a result, people like Cash's first wife Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin) are relegated to the sidelines - or worse, turned into obstacles that must be overcome for the sake of true love.
That said, the film does have its merits. In particular, the music - most of it sung and played by the actors themselves, under the supervision of T-Bone Burnett - is fantastic, so much so that you almost wish the film had been an outright concert movie. As for the Cashes' faith, we'll just have to wait until somebody makes a sequel.
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The Passion of the Christ might not become the annual Easter event that some predicted - the 'recut' version flopped earlier this year - but there's still one Passion-related film event looming on the horizon.
The Big Question is a documentary that was shot on the set of The Passion, and it features interviews in which Mel Gibson and others discuss the meaning of life, the universe and everything. It comes out across North America next spring. - filmchatblog.blogspot.com
