TBT: Walk the Line (2005)

Kendra did a short review of Walk the Line (2005) but since I watched Walk Hard (2007), I figured I should devote some more attention to the film that directly inspired it. True enough, Walk Hard is practically a word-for-ford parody of Walk the Line, and I’m not sure if I should have watched the spoof before watching the original, since it was hard not to sit there and roll my eyes as every single trope played out in total sincerity. I also realized that movies about musicians are so tedious. Like, oh no, your life is sooooo hard with all your precious pain and suffering while doing lines of cocaine off of hookers’ asses in your multi-million-dollar mansion. And I’m saying this as someone who actually is a fan of Johnny Cash’s music…

I’m not sure this film made Cash a sympathetic character, but Joaquin Phoenix does do a bang-up job of inhabiting the role. Reese Witherspoon turned out to be a good choice for June Carter too, but I have such a hard time seeing her as anything other than Elle Woods in Legally Blonde that it’s sometimes distracting. Both did their own vocals as Cash and Carter, and they’re decent enough, but it’s really hard to capture the timbre of June’s voice and the resonance of Johnny’s so listening to the numbers in the film always just sounded weirdly “off” to me (especially if you’ve listened to their songs approximately 80 thousand times … not that I have. ahem Anyway.). But big props to them for going for it.

One thing I do want to point out is that Joaquin Phoenix is way more attractive than Cash was. Like, distractingly so.

Anyway, enough about that, let’s get down to brass tacks. The costumes were designed by Arianne Phillips, who has a passel of well-known films to her name, including such seminal-to-me-as-a-young-adult-films like The Crow (1994), Tank Girl (1995), and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), but not many outright historical films aside from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and Don’t Worry Darling (2022). Phillips’ design on Walk the Line draws easily from the wealth of available reference material on Johnny Cash and June Carter, and the result is a fairly realistic overview of late-1950s through late-1960s fashion.

The film entirely avoids addressing the question of Vivian’s race, which you might be surprised to find out became a massive public debate once Johnny began getting famous — she identified as white, yet she continued to be a target of the KKK for years. Many decades later DNA testing and some genealogical sleuthing revealed she was descended from an enslaved Black woman named Sarah Shields, but the complexity of racial identity makes this a tricky subject to tackle. It’s understandable that a film that isn’t about Johnny and Vivian isn’t going to go into very much detail about their relationship and the incredible pressure that they were under as a public couple in a very racially divided era, but there’s a part of me that really wishes they had cast someone who at least vaguely resembled Vivian. I’m sure there was some producer somewhere in the pipeline that felt that would be “too distracting” from the story about June and Johnny’s relationship, historical accuracy be damned.

Anyway, back to the costumes.

Have you seen Walk the Line (2005)? Tell us your thoughts in the comments!