Walk The Line Full Movie Free Download
Jennifer Leos
Walk the Line is a 2005 American biographical drama film directed by James Mangold. The screenplay, written by Mangold and Gill Dennis, is based on two autobiographies by the American singer-songwriter Johnny Cash: Man in Black: His Own Story in His Own Words (1975) and Cash: The Autobiography (1997). The film follows Cash's early life, his romance with the singer June Carter, his ascent in the country music scene, and his drug addiction. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as Cash, Reese Witherspoon as Carter, Ginnifer Goodwin as Cash's first wife Vivian Liberto, and Robert Patrick as Cash's father.
Walk the Line premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on September 4, 2005, and was theatrically released by 20th Century Fox on November 18. It received positive reviews and was a box office success, grossing $187 million on a $28 million budget. At the 78th Academy Awards, Witherspoon won Best Actress while the film was also nominated for Best Actor (Phoenix), Best Sound, Best Costume Design, and Best Film Editing.
After his discharge in 1954, Cash returns to the United States and marries his girlfriend, Vivian Liberto. The couple moves to Memphis, Tennessee, where Cash works as a door-to-door salesman to support his growing family, but with little success. He walks past a recording studio, which inspires him to organize a band to play gospel music. Cash's band auditions for Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records. Phillips signs them after they play "Folsom Prison Blues", and the band begins touring as Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, alongside fellow rising stars Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Over Vivian's objections, Johnny persuades June to go tour with him. The tour is a success, but backstage, Vivian becomes critical of June's influence. After one performance in Las Vegas, Johnny and June sleep together. The next morning, she notices Johnny taking pills, and doubts her choices. At that evening's concert, Johnny, upset by June's apparent rejection, behaves erratically and eventually passes out on stage. June disposes of Johnny's drugs, and begins to write "Ring of Fire", describing her feelings for him and her pain at watching him descend into addiction.
Johnny discovers that most of his fan mail is from prisoners. He proposes to skeptical Columbia Records executives that he will record an album live inside Folsom Prison. The performance is a success, and Johnny embarks on a tour with June and his band. He later performs "Ring of Fire" on stage. After the song, Cash invites June to a duet and stops in the middle, saying he cannot sing "Jackson" any more unless June agrees to marry him. June accepts and they share a passionate embrace on stage. While Johnny and June are with their families, he and his father reconcile their relationship.
The film has its origins in a 1993 episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.[2] That year, Cash was a guest star on the show, where he and June Carter became friends with Jane Seymour, the star of the show, and Seymour's ex-husband James Keach who was directing the episode. By the mid-1990s, Cash had asked Keach to make a film of his life; he and Seymour began the process with a series of interviews.[2] In 1997, the interviews had been the basis of a screenplay written by Gill Dennis, with input from Keach; two years later, still lacking any studio interest, Keach contacted James Mangold, who had been "angling to become involved in the project for two years."[2] Mangold and his wife, producer Cathy Konrad, developed the script for Sony, and by 2001, they had a script they thought they could pitch to a studio. Sony and others turned it down, but Fox 2000 agreed to make the film.[2]
Phoenix met Cash months before hearing about the film. When Phoenix read the script, he felt there were at least ten other actors who would be better in the role.[3] All of Cash's vocal tracks in the film and on the accompanying soundtrack are played and sung by Phoenix.[4] To prepare for her role as June Carter, Witherspoon studied videos of the singer; she also listened to her singing and telling stories to get her voice right.[5]
Walk the Line has an approval rating of 82% on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 210 reviews, with an average rating of 7.20/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Superior acting and authentic crooning capture the emotional subtleties of the legend of Johnny Cash with a freshness that is a pleasure to watch."[7] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 72 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[8] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[9]
Andrew Sarris, in his review for The New York Observer, praised Witherspoon for her "spine-tingling feistiness", and wrote: "This feat has belatedly placed it (in my mind, at least) among a mere handful of more-than-Oscar-worthy performances this year."[15] He also ranked the film as number seven on his top films list of 2005 and Witherspoon as the best female performance of the year.[16] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B+" rating and wrote: "While Witherspoon, a fine singer herself, makes Carter immensely likable, a fountain of warmth and cheer, given how sweetly she meshes with Phoenix her romantic reticence isn't really filled in."[17] The Baltimore Sun contributor Michael Sragow wrote: "What Phoenix and Witherspoon accomplish in this movie is transcendent. They act with every bone and inch of flesh and facial plane, and each tone and waver of their voice. They do their own singing with a startling mastery of country music's narrative musicianship."[18] In his review for Sight & Sound, Mark Kermode wrote: "Standing ovations, too, for Witherspoon, who has perhaps the tougher task of lending depth and darkness to the role of June, whose frighteningly chipper stage act - a musical-comedy hybrid - constantly courts (but never marries) mockery."[19] David Ansen of Newsweek ranked Witherspoon as one of the five best actresses of 2005.[20]
Some critics found the film too constrained by Hollywood plot formulas of love and loss, ignoring the last twenty years of Cash's life and other more socio-politically controversial reasons he was considered "the man in black".[21]
Cash's daughter, Rosanne Cash, had mixed feelings about the film. She did not enjoy the "painful" experience of seeing the film, "because it had the three most damaging events of my childhood: my parents' divorce, my father's drug addiction, and something else bad that I can't remember now".[22] Regarding the work of the filmmakers, she said "the three of them [in the film] were not recognizable to me as my parents in any way. But the scenes were recognizable, and the storyline, so the whole thing was fraught with sadness because they all had just died, and I had this resistance to seeing the screen version of my childhood. I don't resent them making it - I thought it was an honorable approach. I loved the film Ray, but I'm sure if you asked Ray Charles's kids, they would tell you, "Well, that's not exactly how it was..."[23]
On February 28, 2006, a single-disc DVD and a two-disc collector edition DVD were released; these editions sold three million copies on their first day of release.[30] On March 25, 2008, a two-disc 'extended cut' DVD was released for region one. The feature on disc one is 17 minutes longer than the theatrical release, and disc two features eight extended musical sequences with introductions and documentaries about the making of the film. The film has been released on Blu-ray Disc in France, Sweden and the UK in the form of its extended cut. The American Blu-ray features the shorter theatrical cut.
Wind-up Records released the soundtrack in November 2005. It featured nine songs performed by Joaquin Phoenix, four songs by Reese Witherspoon, two songs by Tyler Hilton, and one song each by Waylon Payne, Johnathan Rice, and Shooter Jennings. The album received a Grammy at the 49th Annual Grammy Awards for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for Motion Pictures, Television or Other Visual Media.
For a lot of people, there's one voice that defines American country music. That's the voice of Johnny Cash. He's been performing and recording for nearly 50 years, and every so often, a new wave of young music fans discovers him. It happened again just recently when he released an album that included songs by Soundgarden and Beck and other rockers. Suddenly, Cash was hailed as hip. But that was hardly news to people who've been listening to Cash since the 1950s. Johnny Cash had his first big hit in 1956. "I Walk the Line" made the country and the pop charts, and pretty much set the sound for the man in black. It also influenced the course of some younger musicians' lives.
When Johnny Cash was growing up in Dyess, Arkansas, in the 1930s, his parents,
cotton farmers, kept strips of green hickory smoldering in the smoke house day and night. In his autobiography, Cash wrote that, `The scent of hickory smoke is another memory gone deep in my bones.' And that smoke seems to have gone deep into his voice, too. But if you ask Johnny Cash's fellow musicians to describe `the voice,' they reach for loftier words: `the voice of truth; of wisdom; of thunder; of America; something ancient, ageless, from the bowels of the Earth.' Singer and songwriter Rodney Crowell has his own take.
Rodney Crowell is one of Nashville's most respected musicians, and he happens to have once been married to singer Rosanne Cash, Johnny's daughter. But his connection to Cash goes much farther back. Crowell remembers the first time he heard "I Walk the Line." He was in the back of a car his father had borrowed to go on a fishing trip, just five years old. The song blindsided him, and he says he can only describe the experience that day as `otherworldly.'
"As an adult, I've really given it some thought about what music before could this song have derived itself from? I couldn't find it in Roy Acuff's music or Jimmie Rodgers because it was a folk format that those songs came from. Yet this song, it was almost like jazz. It was almost like the Southern white man's version of Charlie Parker, in a way. It was just completely turned around and disassembled, and he's modulating down. The chords are changing and he's going up and down. And it--normally with a modulation, you would just start in a lower key and modulate up a half-step or a full step. But he started out by modulating down and then modulating back up. And `I keep a close watch on this heart of mine'--I mean, that's very interior kind of--that's sort of soul searching in a way, if you think about it. And at that time in the '50s--this was pre-Bob Dylan. And, you know, it's sort of existential in a way, you know. `I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. I keep my eyes wide open all the time. I keep the ends out for the ties that bind.' It's poetry, you know, and it's pretty high-level poetry, really, in my humble opinion.
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