Ray, Kinsey, The Aviator: Life Stories - Page 3

The problem with Kinsey is that Condon tells Kinsey's story, from childhood to the mushroom-cloud impact of his research, as a romance in which he overcomes his oppressive father. On the one hand the father-son scenes are sub-analytically banal, and on the other there's no dramatic connection between the brilliantly ironic character Condon has formulated and Kinsey's achievement of his quest. The movie de-evolves into a melodramatic romance in which the dark forces of repression and ignorance amass to cut the funding for Kinsey's work. Uncomprehending "fathers" spring up on all sides. (Read this article by Christina Larson, reprinted from the Washington Monthly, for more about Kinsey's character and the controversies surrounding his work.)

Ray has a more basic, and usual, problem: the telling bits of Charles's character never come together interpretively. One of the first things we see the adult Charles do before he's become famous is to get past a racist cross-country bus driver by claiming to have been in Normandy on D-Day. Later when we see him cheating on his wife and telling her that his heroin habit isn't a problem, we are able to think for ourselves that the conman always ends up conning himself, but the movie doesn't put two and two together. I don't think you can justify it by saying that Ray has too much on its mind--not just Ray Charles's story but the progress of African-American music as the epic of African-Americans generally--because it doesn't have much mind at all.

Yet because it's about a musical performer, Ray comes across at its best moments in a way the more intelligently even Kinsey never quite manages to. Some of the performances of Ray Charles's greatest hits send you right over the void at the center of the movie. One extended sequence, which is like a mini-musical about Charles's transition from an affair with backup singer Mary Ann Fisher to one with Margie Hendricks, is the most skillful the director Taylor Hackford has ever put on film.

The childhood flashback scenes in Ray, showing how Charles's dirt-poor mother relentlessly trained him to be self-reliant after he went blind as a boy, are also far more effective than the childhood scenes in Kinsey. They are not entirely unobjectionable. As an adult Charles always credits his mother with his independence but it's kind of silly to make every word out of her mouth an exhortation. Mother and son have no casual moments together and he has no random memories of her. But the material is primally moving in a way few people will be able to resist, and the specifics just give it more grip--as if going blind as a child weren't challenge enough, Charles is also black, poor, and country in the Depression-era American South. (Sharon Warren who plays the mother also deserves a lot of the credit: she's pretty fierce. But if you want to see the romance of the African-American son of the South given a fuller naturalistic treatment catch Martin Ritt's Sounder (1972), with Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Kevin Hooks, on TCM on February 25 at 4:00 pm.)

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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