Whaddya Say, Ray?

| 17 Feb 2015 | 01:50

    Ray Directed by Taylor Hackford Sex is Comedy Directed by Catherine Breillat TAYLOR HACKFORD has not committed an Ali. This movie version of the life of soul-pop-jazz singer Ray Charles comes on as a well-hyped, prestigious big deal and runs smack into the problem of translating black subculture achievement into a mainstream paragon. The last such culturally loaded film event-Michael Mann's 2001 Ali-was an embarrassment. Mann refused a sensible portrait of Muhammad Ali by insisting on a stylish hagiography-primarily designed to show off Mann's self-serving appreciation of the Ali legend. It was the work of a dilettante, not a sports lover.

    Taylor Hackford's Ray begins more conventionally, evoking the artist's 1930s childhood in rural Florida, then slowly moving forward to confer respectful significance on the course of Charles' life. While this isn't especially original or slick, it seems-after Ali's debacle-to be well-grounded. Introducing a Jim Crow-era South, Hackford lets poverty and struggle establish the pattern of Charles' life. The misfortune of his blindness at age seven (due to glaucoma) is barely a metaphor, yet Hackford contrasts the intensely colored scenes of Charles' youth with a near-sepia depiction of his adult years.

    Subtly hinting at Charles' sense of loss, this esthetic also shows him persevering through an almost monochrome visual depression, highlighted only by sound, sex and music. Hackford's sensitivity is immediately preferable to Mann's "smartness" because it doesn't presume hipster familiarity with the past. Mann's instant chic is what condemns today's audience to mistake superficial flash for savoir faire. It also condemns the bio-pic expropriation of black experience.

    Hackford knows it's best to explore Charles as a character. So he tries getting beyond the Ray Charles icon. In casting Jamie Foxx as the adult Ray, Hackford is assisted by a proven actor who resists oversignifying celebrity through mere imitation. Foxx's grasp of Charles' personality is proven away from the piano and mic-it's when Ray snaps angry at a cheating business manager or contentious woman. There's a fully formed id in Foxx's heated tone of voice. His register isn't far from the actual Charles recordings that he lip-synchs and expertly mimics. More importantly, he speaks with a not-humble, choleric edge. This blind man refuses to be a fool. Fact is, this creator of rousing and moving music also possesses an ego that, when necessary, can turn unfriendly. Ray is best when its drama is determined by temperament rather than the typical stages-of-fame approach.

    Taylor Hackford has not committed a Malcolm X. Spike Lee's candle-burning epic catered to the Malcolm X cottage industry, choosing interminable length and arbitrary detail in a pretense of historical accuracy. Since Charles is already a commercial figure-part of the 50s movement of new black pop stars that included Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Nat King Cole-Hackford can face the grungy aspects of Charles' life while attesting Charles' pioneer status blending secular rhythm and gospel sincerity. This clarifies his importance without whitewashing his life. Charles' cultural revolution, upsetting gospel tradition, gets glossed, but the career, the music-and their aftermath-speak for themselves. Lee's canonizing of an historical personage by having Denzel presuppose martyrdom in pious speechifying is improved here by the material reality of actually hearing Charles' recordings. Foxx underscores Charles' imperishable sound with a complicated human face.

    "He's got that junkie's itch," someone notices when Charles sings his epochal "Night and Day" with its almost kinetic woozy bluesiness. Hackford solves the problem of most jazz bio-pics by not playing up, yet not denying, Charles' addiction. Malcolm X overlooked its subject's vices, and music bios such as Bird and Sweet Love, Bitter took sorrowful or scandalized views of Charlie Parker's failing. Ray's relaxed candor appeals to our changed social attitudes. Hackford implies that a true appreciation of Charles involves appreciating his contradictions-not a sanctimonious approach, not idol-worship.

    Taylor Hackford has not committed a Men of Honor. At this cultural moment a black pop bio-pic is expected to be inspirational-proving that America really works and encouraging fame-hungry youth. George Tillman Jr.'s Men of Honor foundered on that premise. Its official story about one of the first black naval officers overcoming institutional bigotry was swamped in patriarchy; historical reminiscence hewed to the protagonist's idealization of his father. When Hackford emphasizes Charles' childhood memory of his mother's advice ("Never let nobody turn you into a cripple"), the repeated flashbacks provide deeper moral roots. These family sentiments contrast with the brutal business world where young Ray, a sharecropper's son, is exploited in indentured sex slavery to his first manager Marlene (Denise Dowse) and his later wily association with Ahmet Ertegun (Curtis Armstrong), who built Atlantic Records largely on Ray's talent. This give-and-take relationship, which ends when Charles asks to own his master tapes, is not romanticized (Ertegun is made sneakily lascivious), but it only mildly critiques business ethics. Even when Ray pits two managers (Clifton Powell's Jeff Brown and Harry Lennix's Joe Adams) against each other, the men-of-dishonor revelation is little more than ruthlessness at a glance.

    Taylor Hackford has not committed a Why Do Fools Fall in Love? "Nothing is better than sex," Ray says when first told about heroin. Yet, the women in this film compete with the needle. While his love life never becomes an Ike-and-Tina mess, his indulgence is indulged. From wife Della Bea (Kerry Washington) to singer Mary Ann Fisher (Aunjanue Ellis) to Margie Hendricks (Regina King) of his backup singers the Raelettes, Ray's romances are viewed casually. Blues sophistication without blues depth. The trio of women contesting the body and legacy of Frankie Lymon in Why Do Fools Fall in Love? were trashy but, I dare say, more satisfying for shifting the love burden onto resilient females. Ray's masculine privilege is barely scrutinized; instead, it gets excused with a surprising self-pitying defense.

    Committed to balancing chronological order with signs of personality, screenwriter James L. White avoids the bad taste and disingenuous omissions that ruined other recent black pop bios. But Charles' extraordinary story eventually becomes mediocre when it ought to soar-or confront the contradictions of the music biz (remember Little Richards' appearance at the end of the Frankie Lymon flick). White relies on the hoariest bio-pic clichés to depict the gestation of Ray's artistic highpoints (such as the inspired recording of "I Got a Woman," "Hit the Road, Jack," "What Kind of Man Are You?" and the Modern Sounds of Country and Western album). This reduces Charles' art to a consequence of mundane events (Ray's lover's quarrel with his women) or as a mere gesture of banal expediency. It is never acknowledged as the product of truth-telling or mysterious genius. In this sense Ray commits many of the faults of the bio-pics that preceded it. Its significance is in Taylor Hackford's maneuvering past the genre's many ideological obstacles. Thus, I've presented its negative virtues. Ray remains conscientious but unimaginative.

    NO BIOGRAPHER COULD be more candid about filmmaker Catherine Breillat than the image she presents of herself in Sex Is Comedy. This behind-the-scenes fiction drolly depicts Breillat's filmmaking process. It's self-mockery, yet she salutes François Truffaut's Day for Night in a location-scouting opening scene (night-for-day); its serene beauty lifts the movie to a high level of artistic contemplation. Sex is concept for this crazy lady ("I like purity, the dunghill kind"). Witnessing the lubricious difficulties of shooting a sex scene, this is Breillat's most lucid disquisition on her own idées fixées. Sometimes it seems surreal (Breillat's more a female Bertrand Blier than she is a Diane Kurys), which is fitting for a film that is, in the end, about film.

    Playing Breillat, Anne Parillaud goes sharp then whimsical, talking to others as if to herself-literally thinking out loud. It's the year's most intensely watchable female performance (reducing Annette Bening, Laura Linney and Nicole Kidman's recent Oscar bids to mere flouncing). Parillaud shows the connection between intellect and passion. When she breaks her foot and stalks the set with a cane, she is imperial, dominatrix-like. Invading the privacy of her gorgeous guinea-pig performers Gregoire Colin and Roxane Mesquida, she reveals the predatory nature of contemporary filmmaking-an insight equal to that of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's great, one-of-a-kind Salaam Cinema, but it's also a benefit of Breillat's personal confession. She's not a fraud, just an egghead humanist spooked by sex. That's the revelation of the film's final image: an artist/child embrace that could make Ingmar Bergman smile with the joy of recognition.