Call an entertainer’s work “conventional” nowadays and you might receive a gob of spit in your eye. Yet here comes Ray, a biopic about the great soul singer, Ray Charles, and it is as respectful of the conventions of the show-biz screen biography as any movie of the forties or fifties. All the set-pieces of the genre have been slickly packaged by director Taylor Hackford and scriptwriter James L. White: the wounded childhood (little Ray’s trauma at his younger brother’s death and his own blindness), the promise to mama to make good, the appearance of an ancient sage who first puts the little boy’s fingers on the ivories, the discovery of our hero by a shrewd producer, the moment when the hero stumbles upon his own special sound (Ray blends gospel with R&B), the marriage to a Nice Girl, the fall from grace as our hero succumbs to vice (here it’s adultery and drug addiction), the climactic confrontation with the wife when she forces the hero to confront his weaknesses (the law also threatening him with jail unless he shapes up), the Dark Night of the Soul (Ray goes cold turkey and nearly dies of it), and the ultimate triumphs of restored family love, bigger box office, and recognition by the government as a national treasure.
OK, I know I seem to be sneering, but actually I was gripped by this two-and-a-half-hour movie from beginning to end. Why? Was it because most of the clichés actually happened to Ray Charles? I doubt it, since other biopics have put facts on the screen only to turn them into mush.
Two reasons. First, Hackford and White have found an overarching meaning behind the separate episodes of Charles’s career. When little Ray was taught by his mother to be self-reliant (actress Sharon Warren has the loving fierceness of an alley cat defending her litter), the boy took his mother’s precepts to heart not only as a blueprint for success but as commandments from an angry goddess. Guilt-stricken at not having saved his younger brother from drowning, the child may have felt that Obeying Mama was a way of Appeasing Mama. This had good and bad results. Good: Ray found a thousand tricks and techniques to wrest victory from an ungiving world. But also bad: the fanatical need for self-reliance made him a control freak. Virtually blackmailing his wife into taciturn acceptance of his adulteries, he reminds her that it is his money that gives her and the children a luxurious nest in a white world. And the solipsism that is the evil brother of self-reliance brings Ray to the terrible joys of heroin, for is not drug addiction the ultimate self-reliance (despite, ironically, dependence on drug dealers)? Let the mocking world slide by as long as I’ve got my scag and my needle. On the verge of having to go cold turkey, Ray envisions his long dead mother reaffirming her love for him but also reproving him for having become what she always warned him not to be: a cripple, an emotional cripple leaning on heroin. He now realizes that he has both fulfilled and flouted his mother’s command. Here is tragic complexity that overrides the show-biz clichés.
Second, the kinetic power of the production-its speed, abundance of detail, visual veracity, canniness about the music business-testifies to the absolute commitment of the many collaborators who worked on Ray. I have rarely seen such stale situations brought to such life. The moviemakers know that Ray Charles’s travails and victories may echo show-biz cliché, but when they happened to him, they happened for the first time. The flavor of immediacy achieved by cast and crew sweeps Ray above and beyond the conventions of its own genre.
Jamie Foxx-so believably an underdog in Collateral Damage-carries the banner of this movie, holds it aloft, and brandishes it.
If Ray revives the biopic in all its raciness, Kinsey harks back to the “good films-good citizenship” screen biography produced by Warner Brothers in the 1930s, such as The Story of Louis Pasteur and Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet. These often concentrated on the struggles of great scientists, not only to defeat disease but to overcome the forces of reaction represented by nervous bureaucrats, demagogic politicians, and, especially, benighted fellow scientists.
But Kinsey is the twisted stepbrother of the Warner biopics. For starters, writer-director Bill Condon doesn’t have as a hero a scientist who has made an unquestionably good thing-a vaccine, a new method, a surgical device-but rather a tabulator whose sex questionnaires changed, to a certain extent, the American perception of sex. (Yes, yes, Kinsey was a distinguished zoologist whose work on the gull wasp was respected, but that’s not why we have a movie about him.) In this film, the problem isn’t disease but American ignorance of actual sexual practice, and Kinsey’s inspiration is to survey and publish the facts of sex as it is actually done. Was the change effected by the book unquestionably for the better, as was the change brought about by, say, Pasteur? And was Kinsey really an objective researcher or a conscious or unconscious propagandist for sexual liberalization? Condon doesn’t have the answer, and though he uses the Warner Brothers great-man-of-science format, he slyly undercuts it. A Dr. Pasteur might receive support from spouse and young assistants, but Professor Kinsey actually has sex with one of his male aids, Clyde Martin, and tacitly acquiesces when Clyde shares his favors with Mrs. Kinsey. When the young man propositions her in the cozy warmth of a Midwestern kitchen as he digs into a slice of rhubarb pie, she replies, “I think I’d like that” with the insouciance of a good homemaker offering a second slice. There is something surrealistically funny about trying to be rational and civilized (and Midwestern) about sex, and it is this quiet, strange humor that murmurs through the movie, never quite destroying Kinsey’s stature yet always subtly questioning it.
Kinsey rails against “morality disguised as fact” and insists that though love cannot be measured, sex can, so his surveys must concentrate on sex alone without any emotional mucking around. Yet he prods his researchers to have sex with one another’s wives, and then makes notes about the jealousies, quarrels, and vengefulness this spouse swapping incites. This isn’t emotional mucking about?
To be sure, Liam Neeson lets us know exactly what kind of man Kinsey is, even if we can’t be sure of the scientist. With his pomaded porcupine haircut and a nasality superimposed on his powerful voice, Neeson makes Kinsey the ultimate village atheist, a person who believes that everything can be explained in natural, rational terms. The mind, drives, and energy of the man are as powerful and as nasal as the voice. This is an intellectual with tunnel vision who can’t see that people are being knocked astride as he strides down the tunnel. Yet Neeson, like his director, doesn’t let us dismiss Kinsey as totally heartless. There is a moment during a honeymoon visit to Kinsey’s dreadful parents when the young professor is laughing with his wife about his father’s idiocies, and suddenly Neeson turns his laugh into a rictus of pain. The actor negotiates both the deceptively smooth plains and the treacherous craters of this echt-Protestant, echt-Midwesterner with equal ease. It’s a performance that will give Jamie Foxx a run for his Oscar, though Foxx will win.
Foxx will win not because he is better (both actors are superb) but because he is starring in a whole-souled, unironic entertainment. We accept the flaws of the movie’s Ray Charles as the dark spots within a great man’s brilliance. But in Kinsey we can’t accept the great man’s flaws for the sake of his achievement because the achievement itself may have been compromised by the flaws. Condon’s filmic style-balanced compositions, mellow lighting, soothing colors, quietly pulsating score by Carter Burwell, smooth editing, lucid acting-appears to emulate Kinsey’s rationality but, as the professor’s life begins to fall apart, all this cinematic equanimity begins to look like cinematic sarcasm. Yet, the closing scenes are suspiciously packed with multiple reasons to feel sympathy for the researcher, as if Condon was determined to prop up his hero at the last moment: political persecution, heart ailments, the loss of research funding, the failure of university trustees to support him. Finally, a nice lesbian, touchingly played by Lynn Redgrave, has to reassure the doctor that he has saved her life by letting her know that she was not alone in the world.
I’m sure the Kinsey reports did have this beneficial effect for many, but if Ray’s director seems to trumpet, “Take my hero, faults and all. He was a great man,” Bill Condon seems to murmur, “Take my hero...please.”
