Saturday - February 17, 2007
Walking The Line
...
Other than Reese Witherspoon being the greatest thing since sliced bread, there's not a lot about the film that I enjoyed. Maybe that's too harsh. I thought the acting was very good. Not really a bad performance in the acting department....I think the problem for me, at least, was the lack of authentic tension in the plot. I'll see if I can explain what I mean. The film made the most out of Johnny Cash's relationship with his father....His father loved his brother more than him....His father thought he'd never amount to anything....His father this, his father that....Now don't get me wrong. I have no doubt that Cash had issues with his father. I'm not minimizing that.
But I firmly believe that given where he came from (American midwest) and even MORE importantly where June Carter came from (!)...the authentic tension in the plot ought to have been their "sins before God". Divorce would have been a terrible thing for either of them....Loving someone (and certainly having sex with someone outside marriage) would have been just about the worst thing one could do....And yet, even though this is mentioned in the film, it's not explored nearly as much as it should have been....For God's sake, Ring of Fire is about exactly this!
Annyhow, it was a decent film - I just think they dropped the ball with creating an authentic tension. The father/son & the Behind The Music-style drug story are such a "modern" convention....it felt so terribly contrived to me....and terribly inauthentic.
Gotta love Reese, though.