Director James Mangold (as in “mangled” –
thanks, Grant) kicks
off Walk
the Line with an electrifying opening – hundreds of prisoners
clapping
and stomping rhythmically as they wait for Johnny Cash to take the
stage at Folsom Prison – and he blows it.
He segues from this pulsing, tense scene to a sappy, pointless
flashback, and he never regains the thrill and promise of the opening
sequence. What a huge disappointment,
especially considering his two stars, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese
Witherspoon as
Johnny Cash and June Carter, turn in performances that live up to what
the
movie could have been. The movie is
worth seeing for them, but it goes on too long, and it couldn’t have
been more
trite and by-the-numbers. It trots
mechanically
through the de rigueur mileposts – childhood trauma, hateful father,
years of
struggle, etc. – and gets histrionic at all the formulaic points, like
Cash’s
cathartic confrontation with his father at Thanksgiving dinner. Phoenix plays it well, but he shouldn’t have
had to play such a gratuitous, melodramatic scene. Likewise, it’s
interesting to see what inspires Cash’s and Carter’s
songs, but having June murmur after a fight with Johnny, “It
burns, burns, burns,” is a little heavy-handed
for me (“Ring of Fire,”
incidentally, has the honor of being my only karaoke performance,
though in retrospect, I wish I had done “Folsom Prison Blues” instead,
just so
I could sing, “I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die”).
Phoenix is no Johnny Cash when it comes to singing, but there are a few times when he hits a line just right, and it sends shivers up your spine. Witherspoon is, surprisingly, an excellent singer, but then I’m not as familiar with June Carter’s voice as I am with Cash’s. Both give outstanding performances, and they have terrific chemistry, especially on stage.
They are surrounded by other famous musicians, introduced with perfunctory obviousness and portrayed by actors of varying quality. Waylon Payne makes a nicely vicious Jerry Lee Lewis, but I could have played Elvis better than the guy they got to do it – he looks like he’s having a seizure on stage. I mean, the world is full of Elvis impersonators, and this second-rate soap-opera actor is the best they could do?
But that’s a small disappointment to stack
with the larger
one of how a hack director let a potentially great movie slip away,
leaving us
only with two great performances to enjoy.
If Walk the Line is an example of a stale, formulaic biopic, Capote is an example of how to do it right. Technically, I guess, it isn’t a biopic because it covers just a narrow slice of Truman Capote’s life, when he was writing In Cold Blood. But that’s one of the ways in which it tells a compelling story: it focuses on one clearly defined period and doesn’t try to tell Capote’s entire life story. There are things about Capote’s childhood and background that we should know to make the story more resonant, and writer Dan Futterman has done an excellent job of weaving them into the dialogue without sounding like obligatory exposition. If you have a great actor like Joaquin Phoenix or Philip Seymour Hoffman, let him do the work; let him show us how the experience affects the man of today, instead of having a sepia-colored flashback that spells it all out.
And Hoffman is a great actor, proving it again here by completely disappearing into Capote’s character (though I did get a bit of a headache from his high-pitched, whiny voice – think a more fey Woody Allen). It’s a fascinating character, too – Capote is so ruthless in his quest to write In Cold Blood, yet hides it so well with sugary compassion that I started to question everything he said. His conscience is fellow writer Harper Lee, wonderfully played by Catherine Keener, who shames him into behaving like a human being. Also quite good is Clifton Collins as one of the murderers, Perry Smith, who is nearly as emotionally devious as Capote in his own way.
Capote is a
great example of a movie that aims for a specific
mark and hits it, instead of trying to cover a man’s whole life in two
hours. Well worth seeing.
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