Just watched the Johnny Cash movie tonight. There’s something I always liked about Johnny Cash. I’m not sure that I know why. I think my Dad may have been a fan way back and maybe I picked up on that when I was young. The movie started out feeling a bit slow, and for a while I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to see it right to the end in a single sitting. And I never enjoy seeing other people suffering, especially from their own mistakes. So the depiction of Cash getting messed up on drugs and losing his marriage wasn’t really a fun way to spend an evening. But in the end I enjoyed the movie.
It’s the love story that makes this movie work. The director’s commentary on the DVD puts it pretty well -
This more than anything was a story of a man’s redemption, or a story of a man’s second chance. It could have been a film about someone really who wasn’t famous, who didn’t do this incredible concert at Folsom or any others, but was just a guy who got a second chance in life because he was blessed enough to be visited by an angel in the form of a really incredibly great woman.
…
I saw a way of taking a very specific part of John’s incredibly colorful and moving and amazing life and telling a very specific story about how a man can get a second chance, even if he screws his life up pretty badly with the first one, and how much it had struck me that love was an essential component in anyone straightening themselves out and having the courage to kind of reach beyond what they had then.
Even though you can’t treat lightly the mistakes he made and the responsibility he bore for the failure of his first marriage, it is interesting to see the differences between his first wife,Viv and June Carter. Viv (in the movie) was beautiful but kind of self-righteous and her love always seemed conditional on him meeting her expectations. June Carter one the other hand had more personality than looks and faults of her own, but she really did love Johnny despite his faults and brought him back from the brink of his own destruction. I’ve never been a Reese Witherspoon fan at all, but I have to agree that she did a real nice job in this movie.