Saturday, November 19, 2005

"Walk the Line" Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon let it burn, burn, burn -- and do their own singing! -- in this inspiring Johnny Cash biopic. By Stephanie Zacharek Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon in "Walk the Line." Nov. 18, 2005 | There's no way to make a true biopic of a figure as extraordinary and as complex as Johnny Cash: No picture is big enough to hold him. The best you can do is to make a movie about an idea of Johnny Cash, to select a few angles of the man and amplify them into a suitably mighty sound. That's what James Mangold has done in his deeply passionate "Walk the Line," which examines the legend of Cash through the lens of his slow-burning, long-lasting relationship with June Carter, whom he married in the late '60s after having known her -- and performed with her -- for more than 10 years. Writer-director Mangold, his co-screenwriter Gill Dennis, and his two lead actors, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, have captured the sturdy practicality of that love affair: This isn't so much a love story as that of a man grabbing at the last thing he believes he has to live for. Is that last thing the love of God or the love of a woman? Or, as "Walk the Line" suggests, is it both, the two so chronically intertwined that not even Cash himself could tell them apart? If "Walk the Line" isn't the full story of Johnny Cash, it's at least a crucial corner of it, a way of coaxing a legend down to a human scale, without shrinking that legend away to nothingness. Mangold opens "Walk the Line" in 1968, with a tracking shot of the grounds of Folsom Prison. But the sound we hear is far more significant than the visuals are: It's the thrum of a bass line coming from someplace behind concrete walls, muffled but determined -- a sound that heralds the impending arrival of some Swiftian giant. We don't see the crowd of prisoners waiting for Johnny Cash, but we do see the man himself, frozen for a few moments, or many, before going onstage, even though his band has already started riffing impatiently as they wait for him. Cash -- or rather, Phoenix as a dream version of Cash -- is using the prison workshop as his green room, and we see him casually testing the sharpness of a circular saw with his thumb. A few scenes later, we learn that he lost his beloved older brother, Jack, to an accident caused by a saw like that. It's an obvious dramatic segue until you consider the subtext of the images. In this movie, Cash's personal demons show up not as abstract nightmares but in the cold shape of metal, a mirror of the concrete images that figure so prominently in his songs: chugging trains with their whistles blowing, the rhythmic slap of a shoeshine boy's cloth, and, in a song written by the woman who would one day become his wife, the ring of fire that's shorthand for the crazy perilousness of love. From that beginning, "Walk the Line" wends back through Cash's Arkansas childhood and then fast-forwards to his stint in the Air Force and his marriage to Vivian Liberto (played with sympathetic desperation by the always-wonderful Ginnifer Goodwin). From there, the picture hopscotches across the high and low points of the first 15 years of Cash's career, from his first Sun recording with Sam Phillips, to the day in 1968 when he finally persuaded June Carter, his longtime friend and touring partner, to marry him: He proposed to her onstage, which is where the two of them had done much, though not all, of their living. And that right there is the key to "Walk the Line": The movie addresses, as it needs to, how close Cash came to self-destruction via booze and pills, how he messed up his first marriage, how deeply he was attracted to June from the day he met her (according to the lore, they were playing on the same bill and she got her dress tangled in his guitar strings), although she wouldn't agree to become his wife until many years later, and not until he'd cleaned up his act. But Mangold and his performers understand that life is what songs are made of: The picture captures the joy Carter and Cash took in performing, separately but especially together, and if "Walk the Line" is "only" a love story, it's one that doesn't deny the power of the connections that people can forge through music. What's more, Cash's career began around the same time Elvis' did, but he outlasted Elvis by nearly 30 years. Carter couldn't fix Cash's problems for him -- he had to do the work himself -- but as Cash himself attested, she wasn't one to suffer foolish, destructive behavior. Would he have survived that long if there'd been no tough, sensible June Carter waiting for him to fly right? Maybe the only way to play Cash adequately is to be, on the surface, all wrong for the part. Phoenix, with his narrow shoulders and lithe build, is the wrong body type to play Cash -- even the young Cash. And he bravely sings Cash's songs himself, in a voice that gamely struts the territory and yet has one crucial, unforgivable drawback: It just isn't Cash's. But this is a remarkable performance, not because Phoenix pulls off, or even attempts, an approximation of Cash but because he manages to embody the spirit of Cash. Watching Phoenix's Cash perform onstage -- strung-out, his pupils like pin dots -- is both horrifying and exhilarating: Phoenix forces us to confront the notion that unhealthy, unbalanced people can sometimes make incredible art. But in other moments -- for instance, when he speaks to June in his soft, nervous drawl -- he shows us a Cash that we've never seen before, possibly a Cash that didn't really exist. But that's not the point. Phoenix seems to be channeling a private tenderness in Cash that, unless we knew him personally, we couldn't possibly have seen. And yet, listening to songs like "Give My Love to Rose" or "I Walk the Line," we have no doubt that tenderness was real. Phoenix puts it into a concrete, believable framework. With her teased hair and pleasant whipped-butter voice (like Phoenix, she does her own singing in the role), Witherspoon's Carter meets Phoenix's Cash in an impressionistic middle ground that seems to bear some resemblance to reality, without feeling like a desperate attempt to re-create it. Her performance works beautifully. Witherspoon has taken far too many roles that allow her to coast on her tart cuteness; this is the first one she's had in years that seems to have genuinely challenged her. What makes her June Carter so moving is the way she holds herself apart from Cash rather than letting herself fall for him: She stands up to his nonsense on tiptoe, and in a crinoline -- there's never a minute when we're not aware of how grounded she is. As off-kilter and intriguing as these two performances are, "Walk the Line" is still a basic, meat-and-twos biopic, along the lines of "Sweet Dreams" and "Coal Miner's Daughter," and I suspect many Cash fans (as well as that small percentage of the population that's bafflingly indifferent to him) will think it's too conventional. But I think its conventionality is part of its power. Late in the movie, Mangold shows us how Cash, after kicking his drug habit, reconnected with Christianity: We see him going to church with June. She tells him, in a line so unvarnished and raw it avoids dull churchiness, "God has given you a second chance." And almost immediately, Mangold cuts to a scene in which Cash pores over his many fan letters and notices that a large number of them are from incarcerated criminals who love, and relate to, his music. He realizes these are the people he wants to serve. When he approaches a record executive with the idea he's come up with -- making a live recording at Folsom Prison -- the exec tries to talk him out of it: "Your fans are church folk, John -- Christians. They don't want to hear you singing to a bunch of prisoners to cheer them up." But Cash's brand of Christianity, the polar opposite of religious conservatism, was based on the necessity of embracing even those the Lord seems to have forgotten. And "Walk the Line" is an accomplishment for the way it captures that angle of Cash's life alone. This is a democratic and accessible picture. Just as Cash did, it sings for everyone. -- By Stephanie Zacharek 4:58:41 PM    comment []

Bombs Kill Five U.S. Soldiers in Iraq - - - - - - - - - - - - November 19,2005 | BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Five U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday and five others were wounded in a pair of roadside bombings in northern Iraq, the U.S. military said. The soldiers were assigned to the 101st Airborne Division and were on patrol near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, the statement said. Three of the wounded were transported to a U.S. military hospital, and the two others were treated and returned to duty, the statement added. At least 2,090 members of the U.S. military have died since the war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. 4:08:08 PM    comment []

Yes, Virginia, one of the heroes of my youth was indeed a Republican. It took awhile, but the feet of Mr. Woodward have definitely turned to clay.   Woodward's disgrace He was once a great journalist, but his obsession with "access" turned him into a palace courtier and shill for the GOP. By Joe Conason Photo by Ezuma Nov. 19, 2005 | Forced to reveal his strange secret about the Valerie Plame case, Bob Woodward has humiliated his trusting bosses at the Washington Post and exposed something rotten at the center of journalism's national elite. By withholding critical information from the Post's editors and pretending to be a neutral observer, Woodward badly compromised the values that he and his newspaper once embodied. A living symbol of the great constitutional role of a free press -- to hold government accountable -- has evidently degenerated into another obedient appendage of rogue officialdom. With his relentless pursuit of "access," the literary formula that has brought him so much money and fame, Woodward placed book sales above journalism. Boasting of his friendly relationship with the president who facilitated his interviews with administration officials, he now behaves like the journalistic courtiers of the Nixon era. To those who have observed Woodward's career since the glory of Watergate, including readers of his many bestselling books, the change in his role and outlook have long been obvious. For him, the cultivation of high-ranking sources is the very essence of journalism. And while there is no question that reporters owe a duty of confidentiality to their sources, it is also true that they owe candor to their colleagues and transparency to their readers. Sadly, Woodward not only served as a silent accomplice of the Bush White House in its attack on Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, but went much further by publicly criticizing special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of that attack -- and suggested repeatedly, up to the eve of the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, that the investigation should be curtailed. Now, instead, his own admission of involvement may have figured in Fitzgerald's indication Friday that he plans to call a new grand jury in the case. Indeed, Woodward abused his position as a journalistic authority on intelligence and national security issues to denigrate the Fitzgerald probe. Last July 7, on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air," he claimed to know that the outing of Plame's identity had created "no national security threat" and "no jeopardy to her life." He went on to mock the case: "There was no nothing. When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great." He didn't say then how he supposedly knew what consequences did or didn't flow from the CIA operative's exposure. Ten days later, on CNN, Woodward told host (and Post colleague) Howard Kurtz that he didn't think any crime had been committed. He went on to complain about how long the leak investigation had taken. "The special prosecutor has been working 18 months. Eighteen months into Watergate we knew about the tapes. People were in jail." That kind of spin is more worthy of a Republican pundit than a Post editor (and of course Woodward never complained about the extraordinary length and expense of Kenneth Starr's Whitewater investigation, presumably because the sources in that case were leaking to the Post). Woodward reiterated his exoneration of the White House on Oct. 27 -- and on that occasion, he told CNN's Larry King that he knew the CIA had completed its own assessment of the affair and found that no damage had been done in exposing Valerie Plame Wilson. Only two days later, however, his own newspaper reported that the CIA had performed no formal damage assessment -- a process that doesn't begin until after any criminal investigation is finished. And Woodward neglected to tell King's audience that the CIA had originally demanded that the Justice Department investigate the leak because of its potentially serious effects on national security. Those misleading remarks were only exceeded by his disingenuous statements about how the leak might have occurred. Denying that there had been a "smear campaign," he assured King that "when the story comes out, I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter." Of course, Woodward knew then how the leak began, in very specific terms, and used his privileged position to help promote the Republican line. (For a full catalog of Woodward's media misbehavior in this case, see MediaMatters.org.) According to the Post's ombudswoman, Deborah Howell, the public is now outraged over Woodward's conduct. They are confused by his actions and unconvinced by his explanations, which are contradicted by the timeline of the investigation. Post executive editor Leonard Downie, who bravely engaged in a chat with angry readers on Friday, was reduced to offering testimonials about Woodward's truthful character and bromides about his exceptional record. "Bob Woodward never lied," declared Downie. Yet at another point in the same conversation, the Post editor conceded that a reader was "correct" in saying Woodward had been "dishonest in the extreme" and "probably destroyed his credibility." Those consequences of his "mistake," said Downie, would have to be measured against "Bob's exceptional record." So will the contents of Woodward's next book on the Bush administration. 10:46:09 AM    comment []

Staving Off Fascism   Congress Puts Brakes on Patriot Act Action By LAURIE KELLMAN Associated Press Writer November 18,2005 | WASHINGTON -- Congress slowed the renewal of a central part of the administration's war on terror Friday amid a standoff over how long to extend the USA Patriot Act and a filibuster threat by senators opposed to new powers it would grant the FBI. "I believe that more time is necessary," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., "The bill is not now generally understood because of its volume and because of not enough time to really digest the changes." Specter said a compromise is reachable when Congress returns in December from a two-week Thanksgiving vacation. The bipartisan group of lawmakers declared victory, saying they had gathered enough votes to block GOP leaders from forcing a vote on a proposal put forth by negotiators trying to merge House and Senate versions of the bill. The Patriot Act provisions expire Dec. 31 if not renewed by Congress. "This is an issue that we need to see the fine print on," said Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho. "I think there is ample time." Most differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill had been bridged when lawmakers supervising the effort to merge them met last week. But differences emerged on whether provisions governing wiretapping and other FBI information-gathering should be extended for another seven years or just four years. Specter said Friday that bridging that gap had proved the stickiest point. He said House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., doesn't want the provisions to "sunset" until 2012, a presidential election year. Sensenbrenner said seven years simply splits the difference between 10 years in the bill the House passed and four years in the Senate version. Beyond the sunset issue, some senators griped that the compromise draft removed a Senate proposal that would mandate judicial reviews when authorities used the law to search financial, medical, library, school and other records. Salon provides breaking news articles from the Associated Press as a service to its readers, but does not edit the AP articles it publishes. © 2005 The Associated Press 10:29:34 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Michael D. Zungolo. Last update: 12/1/2005; 11:07:43 AM.