My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin Read Free Book Online

variety show exposed a whole new audience to country music. With the help of wife June Carter, Cash was finally winning his lifelong battle against pills and alcohol. After a lifetime filled with death, disaster, and self-destruction, Cash had reason to feel blessed and thankful.
    Cash wanted to give back to a world from which he had taken so very much. According to a radio spot included on the
Gospel Road
DVD, the film originated with June Carter dreaming of her husband reading from a book while standing proudly on a mountaintop. Years later, Carter’s dream came to fruition: As the framing device for
Gospel Road,
Cash’s touchingly clumsy homage to the other JC, Cash reads from a Bible on a mountain in Israel.
    Gospel Road
opens with a sun rising hypnotically over the Holy Land before Cash, decked out in his customary black, turns directly to the camera and begins talking about the prescient words of the prophet Isaiah. The lines on Cash’s impeccably craggy face tell a million stories of sin and salvation, of lost, whiskey-soaked nights of degradation, and triumphant mornings when the Lord’s healing grace washed his soul clean.
    Cash’s performance reeks of high-school speech class. He recites Isaiah’s words stiffly and theatrically, pausing to peer thoughtfully off-camera, as if contemplating God’s unimaginable glory. Cash talks of would-be saviors long forgotten by history and of the one true savior.
    He ends his opening narration by expounding, “Never a man spoke like this man [Jesus]. Never a man did the things on this earth this man did. And his words were as beautiful as his miracles. To manybelievers, their last desire is to be baptized in the Jordan River as Jesus was. They kneel at the holy places, places that are holy just because Jesus was there. They walked the way of the cross and shout ‘Praise the Lord,’ and they mean it. Now come along with me in the footsteps of Jesus, and I’ll show you why they do.” Cash raises his hands in a pantomime of religious rapture when he cries, “Praise the Lord!” Then he points conspiratorially at the audience. His performance is all the more powerful for its naked sincerity. He finally has an opportunity to play a fire-breathing preacher, with film as his unlikely medium and the audience as his unseen flock.
    This opening gives the film a scruffy intimacy. We then cut to a shaky helicopter shot that just barely captures Cash flashing the peace sign. Gibson’s Jesus was a warrior-God.
The Passion Of The Christ
lingered so fetishistically and lovingly over the physical agony of Jesus’ death that it treated his life and teachings as an afterthought. Cash’s savior, in sharp contrast, really is the Prince of Peace. What an incredibly sweet, quixotic way to begin a film about Jesus.
Gospel Road
’s pre-credit sequence once again finds Cash playing the great uniter sending out coded messages of solidarity to hippies, Jesus freaks, and mainstream Christians alike.
    Cash narrates the film and provides the bulk of its soundtrack. His starkly beautiful voice dominates the film as he documents the life and times of Jesus, who is played as a boy by a shaggy-haired, pale, blond, blue-eyed little scamp (Robert Elfstrom Jr.) who’d look more at home waiting in line for tickets to a Jan And Dean concert than perambulating around Nazareth.
    Consciously or otherwise, Cash and director Robert Elfstrom (who also plays a long-haired, sandal-wearing Nazarene carpenter with some crazy ideas about peace and love) turned Jesus’ story into a religious head film. Elfstrom goes nuts with helicopter shots and prismatic effects; doing freaky shit with light and flares seems as important to him as laying down the Gospel. Cash’s wall-to-wall narration and song score only add to the film’s oddly psychedelic flavor.
Gospel Road
subscribes to the notion, popular throughout ’70s cinema, thatthere’s