Walk the Line let me continue working my way through the gift cards from the HFS. The film had a couple of outstanding performances - Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix - as June Carter and Johnny Cash - and both deserved their Oscar nominations. The story is a pretty simple one based on one of the most well-known love stories in modern music - the courting and near loss of June Carter by Johnny (JR and John in the film) Cash - the infamous Man in Black.We open as Johnny is about to step out and perform for the men of Folsom Prison, but we flash backwards to his childhood and the loss of his older brother. The film continues onward in flashback mode until we catch up with Cash's classic prison concert, and then moves forward from there through the point where the Cash's finally get married.
Phoenix does an outstanding job of not imitating Cash but rather taking the feelings of inadequacy and desperation that were the famous man's motivations for so much of what he did and making sure that they enfuse everything that he does throughout the movie. This does not leave Phoenix's performance flat, however, where such a well-known, single-issued character might easily find himself. Instead we get a full-realized man whose feelings are conveyed in small actions.
But the movie belongs to Witherspoon as the object of Cash's continuous ardor. She exhibits a woman who has been famous nearly from birth, thrust into the limelight but uncomfortable with the reasons that she got there, looking for happiness that is acceptable to the world that continues to watch her every action. Witherspoon resists her obvious love for Cash for as long as she can manage, forcing him to earn her love by proving that he is a better man than he wants to allow himself to be.
The film does an excellent job telling a beautiful love story. The one knock that I would lay against the film is that it seems to ignore that spiritual side of Johnny Cash, a side that became so famous to his public persona - especially later in his life. For a two-hour version of Johnny Cash's long life, it does an admirable job. The story - obviously simplified from the real, full tale - is lifted by its performances.
And it has a great poster.
A both greater and lesser film is Good Night, and Good Luck. It is a lesser film because it is too brief a wonderful film, too quick a look into an event that feels it should have taken more time, given us more details. It is a greater film because it has a message, a point, a hope to inspire - which is something that so few films, television shows - really any media - ever choose to do. By the end of the film, I honestly felt like standing up and applauding, cheering the risk that the characters and filmmakers took and the excellent film that they produced.The simple story is that of Edward R. Murrow's and Fred Friendly's newsteam exposing the hypocracy of Joseph McCarthy's communist witchhunt, but the truest essence of the story isn't that at all. The true story is two men choosing to expose the hypocracy of their industry and of the stance of every person in the country who has chosen to allow McCarthy's witchhunt to take place.
The film, the second directed by George Clooney, has an Altman-esque feeling with some of the dialogue intentionally hushed and quiet, showing the paranoia that the characters - and everyone in the nation - must have felt, and the scenes are often interconnected by beutifully-sung jazz songs (they sound like standards, though I didn't recognize them) that have rather direct messages in their lyrics.
The truth to the story comes in the archival news footage of McCarthy that Murrow and Clooney chose to use to tell the story and the outstandingly mature, direct, iconic performance from David Strathairn. He absolutely carries the film by not allowing Murrow to show - to the public - anything less than the strongest, most elequent delivery, never straying from the message, often reading his news commentary from a typed script so that his perfectly-chosen words will not vary even one iota from that perferction. Strathairn also allows Murrow to show that weight that he must have been carrying, knowing that even a single misstep could have - as Clooney points out in the DVD extras - cost the nation another fifteen years of McCarthy's terrorizing.
Any review of the film qould be remiss if it were to not mention the political allegory that Good Night has been portrayed as being. On a shallow level, the parallels between the witchhunts of McCarthy and the current War on Terror are obvious and striking. Saying that the movie is nothing more than an overt slap at the current presidential administration, however, would be missing the entire, deeper point of the film. Instead, the parallels between a medium - television - that was at the time beginning to lose its way, choosing to entertain rather than educate and the current media that have embraced this idea almost fully, allowing education only when it doesn't risk the profitibility of its entertainment side.
The closing lines of the movie - taken nearly word-for-word from a keynote address by Murrow - lay out the challenge inherent in the film:
To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost. This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. Good night, and good luck.This is one of the first films from 2929 Productions, Mark Cuban's production company through which Cuban is challenging Hollywood to live up to Murrow's words. He is a nutcase, admittedly, but he is at least using his money to live his life as he wants to and to better the world in the ways that he feels he can.
This was supposed to be about five flicks, but it's a long enough post already, so I think I'm going to hold off on the other two for right now. Soon to come is Point Blank with Lee Marvin on which Mel Gibson's Payback is based, Short Cuts, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest from the midnight showing at the Rave.
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