Recommended Film: Walk the Line

You can find a whole bunch of links to film reviews of Walk the Line here.

I finally saw this on DVD last week. It's a pretty straight up biopic. It follows the narrative conventions of the form, and so could have been hackneyed or cliched but for its strong performances.

My father took me to see Johnny Cash with June Carter Cash in. . . maybe 1978 or '79 or so. I was just a kid, but I remember the show. The film adapts his life, taking liberties with chronology and many details, but it does a good job.

Of course, the depiction of the characters is a bit sanitized, but that happens whenever you fictionalize the life of a real person. Real people are complex, and the narrative arc of success-failure-redemption of the movie's plot nevertheless captures something true, however familiar, about human nature.

I want to dwell on that for a moment in the wake of my post last week about Richard Scrushy, wherein I advised him to get his life right, reform himself and own up to his crimes. I see this with many talented people, people of genius even, of whom Cash was one: they can often fall prey to their own demons in a big way. I don't know why that is, and though I've studied creativity a good deal, I will simply say great talent or intelligence does nothing to immunize a man or woman from great foolishness, even sometimes criminality. Some err through malice, others simply through idiocy, self-absorbtion or some tragic moral blindness.

Cash's empathy as a songwriter flowed from his basic sense of fairness, identification with the little guy and his humanity, and he was able to use these abilities to accept help when it was offered so he could get himself beyond his addictions. Good for him. I've known leaders who have been able to do the same after making big mistakes, either in their personal lives or their professional lives. But it takes a willingness to learn from failure and to accept a degree of dependence on someone you can trust for change to come. Executives are notorious for refusing to accept such perceived weakness, but the ones who really become great are not so afraid.

Today we learn that Ken Lay died in his Aspen, Colorado bed after robbing a whole lot of people of their money and their livlihoods through his company's wholesale fraud. He had been convicted but not yet sentenced. I don't know if he ever had resolved to get his moral house in order, and in my experience that's a decision that takes deeper root as a person dedicates himself to follow that path after failure. But Ken Lay never paid for his crimes, other than in legal fees.

Richard Scrushy has a chance to begin to turn things around. I never bet that a person will change: the safest bet in any case is that any given person will not change at all. But in the general case, I know that some people do. I've seen people do it and it can be quite inspiring. That's why movies like Walk the Line are popular, not simply because they tell a tale about popular cultural icons, but because they include a message that none of us, no matter how flawed, is beyond hope.