Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsThought Provoking
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 27, 2022
While I liked this doc very much, I didn't come away from it knowing very much about any of the the major players. These kind of things just seem to turn me into a detective, so off I went, down the rabbit hole. As it happens Vivian Litero had a black great grandmother, according to "Finding Your Roots." Johnny Cash had been having an affair with June Carter well before his divorce according to Reese Witherspoon "Charlie Rose" as well as numerous other affairs. Johnny Cash may have been a very confused young man as his early life was full of real poverty and tragedy. And while they courted through letters for three years, when he was overseas they had only dated for three weeks prior to his leaving. Personally I think it was for him more of a case of wanting to be in love rather than being in love. So he married too quickly, and the babies kept coming one after the other, to me in a lot of the photos he does not look happy, and then he basically just stops coming home, not a good sign but a clear one. I don't think he felt she deserved the treatment she got but I don't think he loved her I believe the fact that she may have never stopped wanting his love and acceptance was too much for someone who was self-conscious, catholic, isolated, lovelorn and left behind. I also think that both Vivian and Johnny Cash did not want to believe she was of some black ancestry, as she seems to be the only one in her family that got the black genes, and I think he began to like her less and less as she became surrounded by racial controversy, scrutiny and threatening behavior. It must have been incredibly hard for her growing up in the 1940's and 50's knowing there's something very different about you and not wanting to put your finger on it, and not knowing which parent to point the finger to. I also think most people probably thought it and I'm sure that it caused tension and I don't understand why it doesn't get mentioned in the documentary it's a very big thing to leave out. Anyway I think June Carter may have had her own issues with insecurity or she would have been more respectful of Vivian, and the eldest daughter might have had more compassion for her mother as an adult.
