Capote and walk the line and james mangold and truman capote and bernard miller

I saw these two movies in the last six days and liked both, but felt that Capote will stay with me much longer than Walk the Line. It is not as if I prefer Capote to Cash in real life; indeed the artisty of each has an enduring appeal for me. I love the stark and chiseled narrative of Capote, as haunting and full of foreboding as the bleak Kansas countryside. I love the razor-sharp (as June Carter called it) and gravelly voice of Johnny Cash and the energy that he brought to his music. I love the fact that both of these men are being celebrated now after they lived so long on the cultural margins and fought internal and external demons in the process.

In looking at why Capote worked for me more than did Walk the Line, I focus on three things: (1) the "kick off" event of each moive; (2) the character development; and (3) life after the "big event." The key to Capote's success was its ability to provide answers to these three issues more crisply and definitively than Walk the Line. Here is my analysis of each.

Getting Started

Capote opens with Susan, a friend of Nancy Clutter of Holcomb, KS., discovering the bodies the day after the mass murder on November 15, 1959. She gingerly opens the unlocked front door (a friend from Western KS told me when I lived there in the early 1990s that before the Clutter murders everyone left their doors unlocked all the time in Western KS), tiptoes upstairs and then covers her mouth in horror when she discovers the bodies. The scene then cuts away quickly to a social scene in NYC where Capote is regaling his friends on a recent conversation he had with James Baldwin. We immediately see the problem and the promise of the film. Two worlds, as far away as Manhattan and rural Kansas, will soon meet each other around the experience of murder. A powerful issue is thus presented to us at the outset.

Walk the Line opens in a similarly provocative manner. We learn we are in Folsom prison in January 1968, where Cash is just about to go onstage for a the performance of a lifetime. But he holds back in the wood shop, testing the blade of a circular saw for reasons we cannot yet perceive. However, the second scene clears this up for us, as we meet his older brother Jack, who is injured and then dies in an accident with such a saw when he is about 12. But even though Walk the Line links its first scenes well, the two scenes really have nothing to do with the major point of the movie. Well, that major point is not easy to discern, but it probably is the growing love affair between Cash and June Carter, which reaches its consummation in an Ontario concert in February 1968 where he asks her to marry him during a performance. Walk the Line is therefore confused from the outset. Is this going to explore Johnny's artistry, his guilt over his brother's death, the downward spiral of his life B.C. (Before "Carter") or the love affair with her? We know that Capote will explore the clash of two worlds as Capote tries to understand the slayings of the Cutters, but we are left in the dark about Walk the Line.

Character Development

Then, we have the issue of character portrayal or development. Capote is presented as a complex, multi-sided person who, though accepted in New York society, has seemingly had to fight for recognition after his Alabama upbringing and in the midst of many pesonal idiosyncracies. He is a person whose character remains "unresolved" in the movie. Does he have compassion and even love for the defendants, especially Perry Smith, or is he only "using" them to further his literary aims? Are his bribes of the warden at Lansing (KS State Pen.) and his sentimental stories of abandonment as a child in order to secure information from Smith violations of some kind of ethical taboo of journalists/writers or does he just do what anyone else would do in his position--do anything you could to get a story? Is his self-absorption at the party celebrating friend Harper Lee's Pulitzer-winning book To Kill A Mockingbird a sign simply of his own self-centeredness, or does it also reflect bitterness and envy toward her?

No such subtleties are evident in Director James Mangold's portrait of Cash in Walk the Line. Cash is portrayed as a rather sullen, unreflective, inexpressive man, choosing to internalize the pain of his past rather than speak it. Or, does he really internalize the pain at all? Is he possibly just an insensate brute who is deaf to nearly all messages that come into his life? Cash is portrayed, as one reviewer noted, as a man with a predictable curriculum vitae. After an abusive childhood and a false musical start, he meets and marries a woman, starts achieving success, experiences a growing rift with his wife, falls into a downward spiral of drugs, alcohol and sex with concert goers, loses his wife and family, crashes and burns as a singer, meets a woman who redeems him, gets off the drugs and launches a victorious career. Some of this, indeed much of it may be true, but it is like reading early Christian martyrologies--after many trials they finally enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

But in the midst of this journey, we never feel we get to know, much less develop any sympathy for, Johnny Cash. Maybe he was a quintessentially unsympathetic creature, but there were so many themes that called for mature and subtle characterization--guilt over losing his brother, tension with his father, gradual estrangement from his wife, exhilaration in the presence of June Carter--that went untreated. There are more than enough stories in Cash's life which would have repaid consideration. But the fact that Mangold couldn't focus properly in the opening scenes is perhaps telling: he does't know what to make out of any particular scenes in Cash's "growing up" life to comment upon.

Conclusion--Ending the Movie

Because Director Bennett Miller of Capote has a clear sense of what he is doing in the movie, he has the wisdom to end it at the execution of Hickock and Smith, thus letting the reader fill in the final chapter: now Capote will be able to finish his award-winning book. Walk the Line ends, for all intents and purposes, in 1968, 35 years before June and Johnny die. Granted, Capote doesn't die until 19 years after the final scene of his movie, but all know that he had completed his magnum opus by the time the credits roll. However, Cash still had 1/2 a lifetime ahead of him as a redeemed man, where he continued to tour, produce and live in the gratitude which he so much felt as a result of marrying June Carter. Though you can't do everything in a film, we wonder why there is no picture of the redeemed Johnny. But this isn't answered because the basic question of the movie (what is the root image or metaphor of the movie?) is never answered.

Two entertaining nights, but now you know why Capote joins me in my thoughts more than Walk the Line.

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