One of the obvious reasons biopics get made is the opportunity for one icon to step into another's shoes. Liam Neeson securely embodies the brain-tickling combination in Kinsey of singlemindedness and obliviousness, but it isn't hooked up to the movie's belief in the researcher's heroism. As a result, the outsized romance framework progressively makes Neeson seem smaller, paler, and squeakier, especially as he loses control over his researchers and influence with his patrons.
Jamie Foxx replicates Ray Charles's body language spectacularly, and avoids making the man too likable. Foxx seems as if he's able, and willing, to depict any characteristic with total honesty. But he doesn't have the dramatic authority or, given the need to be recognizable as Ray Charles, the freedom to fill in the character where it hasn't been written. He's more than respectable as Charles but finally his hilarious performance in Booty Call (1997) is more fully achieved. (In Ray Foxx is as ideally cast, and nearly as limited by the deficiencies of the movie, as Donald O'Connor in the infinitely more fraudulent Buster Keaton Story (1957).)
In The Aviator Leonardo DiCaprio is at a huge disadvantage because of how wide the gap is between the Hughes romance and the buggily prosaic obsessive-compulsive disorder. His performance has two modes, burning and burnt-out. The men's room scene in which Hughes is so paralyzed by his fear of contamination he can't hand a towel to a man on crutches makes the hopelessness of the movie's conception plain. How can they not play this for comedy of some sort? But they'd never dare to because that might make Hughes seem merely human which would really deflate the romance blimp.
The Aviator is certainly lively, with guest-star villains Alec Baldwin as Juan Trippe and Alan Alda in impressively unemphatic form as Senator Brewster, and a number of Hughes's famous squeezes, including Cate Blanchett overdoing it as a Katharine Hepburn who is too constantly being "Katharine Hepburn." Among the ladies, I preferred Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, who comes across as a character first and the identifiable celebrity only incidentally. When she rejects Hughes's marriage proposal by purring, "You're too crazy for me," I knew just how she felt. He's too crazy for everybody connected with the movie.
To be fair, the triumph of conventional romance over naturalism may be unavoidable in biopics because we want to see the "inspiring" life story of someone only if we've romanticized him as the vessel of his achievements. We may not want the facts to be misrepresented but we don't want the glory to be dimmed, either. (Read Stanley Crouch's obituary for Ray Charles in Slate to see what I mean: "Charles was one of those special few who expands the democratic experience by proving that neither color nor a handicap mean that one is less a man…." How do you dramatize that sort of reverence?) The day-to-day man, on the other hand, was a real person and can be recreated only with the detail-by-detail approach of naturalism.
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