My Year of Flops (7 page)

Testifying Book-Exclusive Case File: Gospel Road: A Story Of Jesus

There once lived an icon notorious for the violent nature of his art. He was a dark, troubled soul plagued by rapacious personal demons, a man whose battles with substance abuse were legendary. Yet this tortured soul clung to faith as a life preserver in a sea of darkness. A man of fierce contradictions and even fiercer convictions, this shadowy figure used the power, money, and clout he made peddling bloody entertainment to spread the Gospel.

Ignoring the most sacrosanct commandment in all of entertainment—Thou shalt not invest thine own money—he sank much of his personal fortune into a supremely risky venture. Ignoring conventional wisdom, he traveled abroad to co-write, produce, and finance a movie about Jesus. Jesus had saved this tormented soul from himself and his compulsions; now he wanted to share that redemption with the secular world.

We all know how this story ends, don't we? With the mystery man in question triumphing over the skeptics and doubters en route to delivering one of the most commercially successful independent films of all time. Then he was undone by the Jew-run law-enforcement establishment and a sugar-titted lady cop one drunken night. Ah, but this isn't a book about winners. It's a tribute to the losers. So the man in question isn't Mel Gibson, and the film isn't
The Passion Of The
Christ.
No, I'm talking about Johnny Cash's half-forgotten 1973 religious drama
Gospel Road: A Story Of Jesus.

In the late '60s and early '70s, Cash was, in the hackneyed parlance of
Behind The Music,
riding high.
Live At Folsom Prison
(1968) resurrected his flagging career and rebranded him as a proud champion of the underdog. A year later,
At San Quentin
did even better, thanks to a bleakly funny Shel Silverstein–penned number called “A Boy Named Sue.” Cash's beloved network 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 many
believers, 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, that
there's nothing more fascinating than watching a hippie dude wander around with an evocative song as his soundtrack. But this time, the hippie dude in question is Jesus.

Just as he adopted the form of a coyote and led Homer Simpson on a spiritual journey, Cash leads us on a greatest-hits tour of Jesus' life and times. We follow the Good Shepherd as he's baptized by John the Baptist, picks up his entourage of 12 followers who treat him like he's the first coming or something, is anointed the Son of God, and, to use arcane religious terminology, loses his shit and freaks the fuck out upon discovering moneylenders in the temple. We learn the origin of all of Jesus' beloved catchphrases, from “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” to “Judge not, lest ye be judged” to “Ask and ye shall receive.”

Gospel Road
offers the gospel according to Johnny Cash. When Cash tells the camera, “Jesus addressed men as men and not as members of any particular class or culture. The differences which divide men, such as wealth, position, education, and so forth, he knew were strictly on the surface,” he seems to be espousing his own radically egalitarian mind-set as much as Jesus'.

Though it follows Jesus' life in a linear fashion,
Gospel Road
frequently gives over to abstraction, as when Cash pontificates on Jesus' teachings during an endless helicopter shot of water glistening in the sun.
Road
is all about pretty images and pretty words; it doesn't particularly matter how the two fit together. In the film's boldest move, it places the crucified Jesus and his cross in the middle of a modern city, collapsing the impossible gulf between the past and the present in the process, and underlining the timelessness and contemporary resonance of Jesus' story and message.

“I bet Mary Magdalene walked this same beach I'm walking on. I wonder what Mary Magdalene really looked like. The Scriptures don't tell a lot about her, but what little is told has made her the subject of more speculation and controversy than any woman I've ever heard of. Jesus was to suffer much criticism for his association with people of questionable character.” Cash narrates as he walks along the beach,
still looking directly into the camera and emphasizing the words “questionable character” in a manner that underlines how directly it applies to him.

Within the context of the film, Cash didn't have to wonder what Mary Magdalene looks like, since June Carter plays her. The film never explains why exactly Mary Magdalene has a Southern drawl, or why a novice actor is the only thespian allowed to deliver her own lines, instead of having Cash narrate her story.

“You know, we can't forget the fact that Jesus was human,” Cash reminds us in the film's key line.
Gospel Road
is ultimately as much about Cash as it is about Jesus. It is a film of trembling earnestness and unquestionable devotion. When Cash reflects on how he likes to imagine children frolicking with his Savior, the film becomes uncomfortably, even unbearably personal. Cash is revealing himself and bearing witness. The coolest motherfucker on the planet is willing to look defiantly uncool if it means saving souls. In this context, it almost seems unfair to criticize the film on aesthetic and artistic grounds, since
Gospel Road
is intended first and foremost as an evangelizing tool and a profound expression of personal faith.

Gospel Road
makes its relatively brief running time feel like an eternity. It's more home movie than Hollywood, but that's much of its scruffy charm. It's really the story of Cash's faith; in its own ham-fisted fashion, it embodies the yearning for deliverance and singular combination of strength and vulnerability that made Cash such an enduring icon.

Cash took the failure of
Gospel Road
hard. The public that had so warmly received him during his comeback didn't reject
Gospel Road
so much as ignore it, relegating Cash's peculiar passion project to sleepy Sunday school showings in church basements.
Road
marked the beginning of a dark period in Cash's life. He fell off the wagon, returned to pills and bad behavior, and entered a professional free fall that lasted until his
next
spectacular comeback, courtesy of Rick Rubin and the American Recordings label.

Yet I prefer Cash's amateur-hour take on Jesus to Gibson's far more
technically accomplished version. You know, we can't forget the fact that Cash was human. That messy, naked, raw humanity and humility makes
Gospel
far more moving than it has any right to be.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Chapter 2