As Ray makes clear, thrillingly at times, the subject's working life gives the biopic something to show, at any rate, but not necessarily a way to bring out character explicitly, in dialogue. And no Hollywood biopic can resist stating its ideas about the character in unambiguous prose, whether or not those ideas have been interestingly developed. In Ray, Kinsey, and the Cole Porter movie De-Lovely (click here for my review), much of this work is left to the subjects' wives (making the movies partial allegories).
It works best for Ashley Judd in De-Lovely because Linda Porter's growing dissatisfaction with her husband's indifference to consequences increasingly merges with Judd's slightly melancholy star persona. Laura Linney as Kinsey's wife Mac isn't as lucky because Condon hasn't come up with a concise character to match her husband's. Mostly Mac is as matter-of-fact about sex as her husband but later she also feels the social disapproval of people in Bloomington, Indiana, where Kinsey teaches at IU, and the two sides of her character never quite adhere. (They're like two sides of different coins.) Mac's most successful function is to see, when Kinsey cannot, how much he has become like his father, especially in his relationship with their son. But this just saddles her with responsibility for the least interesting element of the movie. Kerry Washington as Ray Charles's wife (his first wife, though their divorce has been cosmetically eliminated from the movie) has the most thankless variation of this role: nagging. She shades his character for us at the expense of her own.
Because biopics are shaped as romance, the hero must be faced with internal temptation that threatens his quest as well as external opposition to it. And since they do it without a sophisticated sense of how allegory works they mostly turn into melodrama. The temptation and opposition are typically the elements most clumsily adapted from the life story to the romance form, to boot. Ray has an advantage in that Charles's temptations--heroin and women--actually are temptations. But his opposition takes the standard form of people telling him that he can't do artistically what he wants to do, and then in the '60s it takes the form of prosecution for drugs as payback for his refusal to play in segregated musical venues. (He makes this decision after about five seconds' deliberation in what is arguably the least dramatic treatment of the Civil Rights Movement on film.) Charles is thus shown as kicking heroin in order to defeat the forces of racism. To treat anything to do with addiction as heroic is to be truly lost in the romance of your subject.
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