Mark Reviews Movies: THE GIFT: THE JOURNEY OF JOHNNY CASH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 24, 2019

The disembodied voices of friends, family members, fans, and fellow musicians are heard, narrating the life of Johnny Cash, and so is the Man in Black's own voice. The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash uses the documentary conceit of talking heads as a narrative device, but the actual omission of any contemporary faces, talking in front of a blank wall or a generic backdrop, goes a long way to maintaining the film's focus on Cash himself.

Director Thom Zimny primarily uses archival elements to tell this story. It's a familiar tale—of a kid who wanted to sing, of a singer who became obsessed with music to the detriment of everything else in his life, of a man who discovered redemption in love and faith, of a legend who almost faded without fully realizing his impact on the world.

A lot of the narration does come from Cash himself, who, in addition to the countless interviews he gave throughout his life, also recorded hours of autobiography on cassette tapes. Those recordings play on an empty tour bus, on a tape deck surrounded by photographs and at least a single acoustic guitar, as it travels along some country roads.

The imagery of and onboard the bus is, as far as we can tell, the only modern-day footage in Zimny's film, and even then, it represents the ghosts of what was. There's a haunting, maybe even haunted, quality to this documentary, as if we're listening to that famous voice, with its trademark bass timbre, not just tell the story of his life. It almost feels like a final act of confession. Cash infamously had a lot to confess, from his addiction to alcohol and drugs, to the difficulty of being there for his first family, and to the nearly lifelong guilt he felt for the death of an older brother.

The narrative here basically recounts the musician's life in chronological order, from his childhood until his death (with his 1968 concert at Folsom State Prison serving as a compass of sorts). Simply by keeping the focus on Cash's own words and music (using the voices of other people, including two of the singer's children, to confirm facts or fill in some blanks), though, The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash creates an actual, evolving sense of mood—pain, hope, regret, closure—to accompany those events.

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