Cash’s daughter doesn’t toe the movie Line

Speaking of alternative interpretations of the life of Johnny Cash, the Associated Press reports that his daughter Kathy is none too happy with Walk the Line, the film about Cash’s early years:

Kathy Cash, one of Johnny Cash’s five children, was so upset about how her mother is portrayed in the upcoming movie “Walk the Line” that she walked out of a family-only screening five times.

She thinks the movie, which opens nationwide Nov. 18, is good and that performances by Joaquin Phoenix as her dad and Reese Witherspoon as her stepmother, June Carter Cash, are Oscar-worthy.

But she also said the film unfairly shows her mother, Vivian Liberto Distin, Johnny Cash’s first wife, as a shrew. Actress Ginnifer Goodwin plays her in the movie.

“My mom was basically a nonentity in the entire film except for the mad little psycho who hated his career. That’s not true. She loved his career and was proud of him until he started taking drugs and stopped coming home,” Kathy Cash said.

Vivian Liberto Distin died earlier this year as a result of complications from lung cancer. She and Cash were married 13 years and had four children together. He pledged to remain faithful to her in his song “I Walk the Line.” . . .

I’m not entirely sure how to respond to this, since I have had a small crush on Ginnifer Goodwin ever since I saw her in Mona Lisa Smile (2003) and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (2004), and I find it well nigh impossible to dislike her in anything.

But I think it’s fair to say that the film portrays Cash’s first wife as The Woman Who Wants To Domesticate Our Hero Because She Doesn’t Understand Why An Artist Won’t Take A Regular Job, and she is thus portrayed as something less than the soulmate that June Carter became — and thus, in a way, the film might encourage us to think that Cash needed to leave his first wife in order to be with June because, well, “Have they no right to happiness?” (to paraphrase a famous C.S. Lewis essay on sexual morality).

Oh, and FWIW, Kathy’s account of the relationship between her father, his family, and his drug addiction agrees more-or-less with the account in Cash’s comic book, at least as I recall it.