Amy & I went to see Walk the Line last night, since it was re-released this weekend. We missed it the first time around, as did a lot of other people, it seems. The 6:45 show at a smallish theater in suburban NJ was packed. (I hadn’t been in the place since I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark there. In its first run.) The audience was composed of middle-aged and older couples; the kids were all downstairs watching Underworld: Evolution or Tristan & Isolde (?).
We really enjoyed the movie. Having just finished that Sam Cooke bio, I was pretty familiar with how messed-up the touring life was for performers in the 1950s and 60s. Admittedly, that was mainly from the perspective of black gospel and then R&B tours, but a lot of that stuff (travel, booty) is universal.
Joaquin Phoenix’s performance was a blast. I wouldn’t say he was “channeling” Johnny Cash, but he managed to capture the utter hauntedness of the role, the sense of a soul at tension with salvation and being damned-on-earth.
The opening image — a buzz-saw in the wood shop of the Folsom Prison — made me think of just that: the jagged teeth of the saw radiate out from the disc of the blade like sunbeams in a religious painting. Phoenix runs his fingers over the blades, triggering the long reminiscence that comprises the bulk of the movie. The saw looked like the harshness of salvation.
That said, Amy felt that Reese Witherspoon didn’t sound much like June Carter, but we both enjoyed the chemistry they had, and the exuberance she brought to the character. We also both thought, “Wow: someday, Cash’s daughter Roseanne is going to end up with Ron Rosenbaum proposing to her through his column in the NY Observer.” Good thing we’re getting married; no one else would put up with us.
SPOILER ALERT
Which brings me to this Moment I had. As I mentioned, the audience at the theater was all couples, generally in their 50s and older. Near the end of the movie, Cash finally gets June to accept his marriage proposal (he tries like 40 times over the course of their relationship) on stage during a show. It’s a pretty romantic scene (even though her character’s mainly been shown in relation to Cash, not as a person in her own right).
Naturally, I thought about how I proposed to Amy last May (the wedding’s 7 weeks from today, which is sorta mind-blowing). But then this Moment happened: I thought about everyone else in the audience. All of these older couples out on a Saturday night to see a movie: no matter how prosaic their lives may be, no matter what other experiences they’ve had, all of these people had the most romantic moments in their lives, that night (or day or morning) they proposed to their future spouses. You can bash the sentiment as much as you want, but all of those people felt at some point that they wanted to be with their partner for the rest of their lives.
I felt elated, as if I was soaking up the light of all those concentrated moments of love.