..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Rent: A Down Payment

I saw Rent last week at a New York preview where the audience was partly reviewers and journalists but mostly enthusiastic teenagers who, from the start of the movie were audibly thrilled. Throughout the screening, their appreciation could be heard even at higher-volume numbers. As the end credits rolled, a couple dozen stood, lingered, even as everyone else filed out. Mostly girls, some guys, most with eyes closed, they swayed as they mouthed the lyrics perfectly. At the very end of Rent, after the copyright notice, there's a final credit, and it seemed that everyone looked toward the screen at just that moment and as they read the words, a short, sharp intake of breath was all you could hear, and as one, they all bowed their heads. The credit reads, "Thank you, Jonathan Larson."

..The Posters ..MCN Review

Cash is Money

When a movie moves me as much as Walk the Line (*** ½) has, I figure there's got to be something wrong with me: I don't believe my eyes and ears. I have rarely seen a movie so beautiful, so simply about need and want, impossible love, implausible grace.

"The most wonderful thing about life seems to be that we hardly tap our potential for self-destruction," John Cheever wrote. "We may desire it, it may be what we dream of, but we are dissuaded by a beam of light, a change in the wind." In the case of Mr. John Cash (Joaquin Phoenix, haunted, furtive yet hopeful), a musician haunted by an early loss and who does everything to keep love at a distance, that beam, that breeze, that hope, that salvation is a woman and a voice called June Carter (Reece Witherspoon, a radiant life force).

Spare as a dream, intent as nightmares, simple as devotion, Walk the Line shook me like no other movie I've seen this year, with the thinnest of threads for its characters to balance upon: blanched to sticks of story, it goes that Cash has always felt unworthy of anything. The death of a beloved older brother when a boy - the blessed, golden, worshipful one - leads to a lifetime of scorn from a bitter father and judgmental mother. Brother died; John's lost. Elementally, that would be the sad refrain of a Disney "want song." Yet, in staying close to the physical and moral obstacles that keep Johnny and June apart for years, Walk the Line is so much more.

I made some of these notes in an earlier Toronto International Film Festival review, but there reamined ten thousand personal reasons I am left slack-jawed and dewy-eyed at James Mangold's movie, written with Gill Dennis as well as extensive, years-long cooperation of the late couple. That's why I'm left wondering if the specifics of the movie are universal, or is it a very personal reaction to Cash's tale and Mangold's estimable craft as a director of actors and shaper of space? I'm Southern, and grew up rural and poor, too, and there is a terrible tale of a brother dead too young that hits too close to home. Johnny Cash's music was ubiquitous when I was growing up, on the turntables of even those who didn't have many records in the house or care to listen to music. But still, I'd hope this beautiful movie about human love, hope and redemption (with hints of a more spiritual perspective) would have the same hold on others, from the sustained, percussive opening scene's gliding shots along empty prison corridors and exercise yards, Cash's band vamping so loudly, echoing so much that it might as well be the stamping feet of the excited inmate audience. Cash poises his finger over the teeth of a table saw, a life on a string, soon to draw taut.

A second viewing might make it easier to talk about what consummate, fiery, intelligent performances (including the musical moments) by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. (A key moment in their increasing attraction comes on a tour date while they are still agonizingly platonic and share a stage for a duet of Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me, Babe.") Walk the Line is a framework for two forceful personalities to meet and align: John and June, I mean, not Joaquin and Reese. I admire both these actors, but they are so good here.

As for the composition and light of the film, a refinement of the style Mangold has honed in movies like Heavy, Copland and yes, even Identity, there's quiet beauty in a widescreen Winslow Homer-style imagining of a long dirt road to bottomlands when two boys go fishin', the frame twenty percent earth to eighty percent increasingly dark and roiling sky. Many other frames throughout are slabs of negative space, other vast skies, under-decorated walls, the simplest of brand icons and similar touchstones, the hints in memory rather that explosions of "production value." (I'm using "negative space" as the term of art for the admission of absence or lack within a frame.) Mangold's frames, like all he's drawn in his handful of films so far, are richly, tellingly composed. But none of this gets in the way of the love story. It's a pretty frame, but first, you see the picture.

The households of women I grew up around had a thousand locutions and hundreds of euphemisms, but there is one Walk the Line reminded me and lodged in my brain. To say "I swear" would have been an oath against the Lord as foul as "I swear to God" (and worse), so they'd just marvel at a moment of ridiculous or glorious human attainment, wide-eyed at it all with a breathy, "Well, I swan!"

Walk the Line? I swan.

Inspired eavesdropping: Ballets Russes

Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine's Ballets Russes (*** ½) is one of those inspired examples of documentary as a feat of eavesdropping: roll camera and loose the remembrances. Two competing troupes split off from the dance company founded in 1909 by Serge Diaghilev, and Goldfine and Geller chart the six decades of competition through an incredible wealth of thrilling footage, yes, but also from the spirited remembrance of a dozen or so articulate septuagenarian and octogenarian survivors. Ballets Russes is not a movie about dance: it's about living. High-art soap opera, this is grand. May we all live so long and well. Narrated by Marian Seldes. The directors edited, with input from experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky.

November 21, 2005

- Email Ray Pride