This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Man in Black
Plot Overview
WTL opens in medias res set in 1968 with country
singer Johnny “J.R.” Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) in a prison
wood shop getting his thoughts together as he prepares to perform
for an appreciative (mostly white) audience at maximum security
penitentiary Folsom Prison. His older brother Jack had
died in a table saw accident when J.R. (Ridge Canipe) was 12 and it
still bothers him.
Going back to that fateful day in
1944 J.R. and Jack listen to their favorite singer June Carter (10)
on the radio at night before turning it off and listening to the
trains in the distance. Jack confides he wants to be a preacher,
but J.R. is more into music. The next day Jack excuses J.R. from
spotting him on the saw to go fishing. In the interim Jack
gets eviscerated and J.R, says his final goodbye:
“Jack, please don't leave me alone.”
In 1952 J.R. is inducted into the
air force and sent to Germany where he's assigned clerical work that he
doesn't much care for. He and the troops watch a px movie about
“bloody Folsom.” He buys a secondhand guitar and
learns how to play it. Albeit he and his brother were cordial to
each other, here he learns to be more assertive with his fellow
troops and monopolizes the phone to propose to his girl back
home promising her the moon. They'd only dated one month but they
love each other.
After he
musters out of the service he marries his sweetie Vivian (Ginnifer
Goodwin,) they start a family, and he ignores her father's job
offer to instead do sales work where he learns to be persistent. He
and his two-member band stumble into an audition in which he uses
his sales talent to turn Sam Phillips's rejection into an
acceptance on his label. They make a record. The band gets a
drummer and Johnny Cash becomes a sensation. They go on tour where
he befriends June Carter (Reese Witherspoon.)
All
is not well on the home front. Viv doesn't allow J.R. to veg out on
the couch when he comes home from a tour exhausted. She forbids him
from talking about his work, only about “regular
things.” She removes pictures of his group from his man-cave.
They get into a tussle and she splits with the kids. Johnny has
been a dutiful though flawed husband, and viv a less than perfect
wife. These are not problems unique to the music industry. God set
Adam in the garden to dress and to keep it, and He gave him Eve for
a help meet. Traditionally—and these people are
traditional—a wife is to fit in with her husband's career and
help. Even James Dobson and Martin Luther experienced the problem
of a demanding wife when they came home tired from a lecture tour.
If J.R.'s good brother Jack had lived to become a preacher, he
might well have experienced it, too. Viv complained that J.R. had
not kept the promises he made, but he had except for failing to make her
happy. One should not rely on others for his or her happiness, eh?
Johnny took June into his band on the autoharp. He persistently tried to get her to marry him. If you think this divorcee was offering her damaged goods, consider that June was herself twice divorced by now. The movie ratchets through the years from Johnny's air force stint to his marriage to June, along the lines of Emile Zola: “I am growing old, my dear child; I shall soon be thirty. It's terrible. Nothing gives me pleasure. … You who are twenty cannot know …” (6) And Claude Tillier:
What is it to live? To rise, to go to bed. to breakfast, to dine, and begin all over the next day. When one has done these things for forty years, it becomes a little tedious. …Title cards provide an epitaph.To live—is it worth the trouble of opening our eyes? Nothing we do goes much beyond a beginning. The house we build is for our heirs; the dressing gown we so fondly pad to envelop our old age will be made into swaddling clothes for our grandchildren. We say to ourselves, There the day is ended! We light our lamp, we poke up our fire, we get ready to pass a pleasant peaceful evening at the corner of our fireplace. Ra-ta-ta! Some one is knocking at the door. Who is there? Death. We must go. When we have all the appetites of youth, when our blood is full of iron and alcohol, we are penniless. When our teeth and stomach are gone, we are millionaires. We have barely time to say to a woman, I love you. At our second kiss she is old and decrepit. (8-9)
Ideology
(Prov.
30:15-16) “The horseleach hath two daughters, crying,
Give, give. There are three things that are never satisfied, yea,
four things say not, It is enough: The grave; and the barren womb;
the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire that saith
not, It is enough.” There are two kinds of definitively
dependent folk (“crying, Give, give”): the very
young—out from the womb, and they keep coming—and the
very old—heading for the grave, and they keep leaving.
“The earth that is not filled
with water” references the ancient worldwide flood. When
it drained away, the earth was able to establish a productive
ecology. As authoress Donna Howell with Dr. Thomas Horn puts it (from Job 38:8, Job 38:26-27):
Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? [Shutting the “doors” to the sea denotes God's majestic ability to limit Earth's waters so the planet will not fall prey to perpetual flooding. “When it brake forth” is considered by many to refer to a time Earth was flooded, and of course, most assume this to be Noah's Flood. To Gap theorists, this entire speech is a reference to an epoch more ancient than Noah; it glances back to the “deep” of Genesis 1:2.] To cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man; To satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth? (113)
Young J.R.'s family farm had lots of
tillable land and we see them harvesting cotton on it. In his phone
call in the air force he told his girl to tell her dad that he's a man
and can support a family. “The fire that saith not, It is
enough” is human metabolism that burns day and night and must
be fueled. Children must be nourished. Eventually J.R. would have
to care for his dad as he ages. “They supported their
fathers, and, when they were old, their children would in turn
support them” (Tillier 14). The final scene is of a large
family gathering at J.R.'s big lake house; Both his and her broods
of similar ages were playing together—they'd some time have
another together—and the grandfather was most welcome.
It was a big well-tended family.
Production Values
“” (2005) was directed by James Mangold. It was written by Johnny Cash, Gill Dennis and James Mangold. It stars Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Patrick, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Sandra Ellis Lafferty. The acting was all good, and I especially liked Goodwin playing Vivian Cash and Dallas Roberts playing Sam Phillips. Witherspoon was swell, but I prefer to see a country girl with a little more meat on her.
MPA rated it PG–13 for some language, thematic material and depiction of drug dependency. The music was sublime, the romance credible, and the plot historical. It had a runtime of 2¼ hours.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
The
movie makers did their best to give Christians a happy ending. The
stern father has stopped his drinking, J.R. has gotten over
philandering and pill popping, and they all go back to church. They
don't have stickler Jack to uphold the highest view of marriage
(“Divorce is an abomination. Marriage is for life,”)
but they offer an apology of sorts (June Carter: “I'm sorry
I let you down”) while delineating enough of its difficulties
to give one pause before entering it.
If a man were [only] free to choose a companion for himself; but the necessities of social life always force us to marry in a ridiculous way contrary to our inclinations. Man marries a dowry, woman a profession. Then, after all the fine Sundays of their honeymoon, they return to the solitude of their household, only to see that they do not suit each other. One is stingy and the other extravagent; the wife is coquettish and the husband jealous; one loves like a tempast and the other like a gentle breeze; they would like to be a thousand miles apart, but they have to live in the iron circle within which they have confined themselves, and remain together usque ad vitam aeternam. (Tillier 30)Only in this case Cash's first wife married for love after dating him one month and contrary to his incompatible professional goal.
The music was likable and well integrated into the plot. It was the tunes that held it together, which otherwise would have seemed disjointed. For Johnny Cash and country/rock music fans.
Movie Ratings
Action Factor: Weak action scenes. Suitability for Children: Suitable for children 13+ years with guidance. Special effects: Average special effects. Video Occasion: Good for Groups. Suspense: A few suspenseful moments. Overall movie rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture is quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
Howell, Donna and Dr. Thomas Horn. Before Genesis. © 2023 Defender Publishing. Crane, MO: Defender Pub., 2023. Print.
Tillier, Claude. My Uncle Benjamin. Copyright 1941 by Coventry House. New York: Coventry House, 1941. Print.
Zola, Emile. The Kill. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org