Because the City of New Haven is one of the country's worst-served in terms of the motion-pictural arts (within the city limits: population, 123,626; number of movie screens, 7) I try to make a point, whenever I get back to New York, of seeing a few movies. I remain undeterred by the obscene ticket prices (adult tickets: $10.25) though they do force me to be somewhat more,
discerning, when it comes to my cinematic selections. No more seeing every John Travolta release as when I was a young man, when the beer flowed like wine and the women flocked like the salmon of Capistrano. Under these oppressive conditions, I'd've never seen such masterpieces as
"White Man's Burden". Oh, the humanity!
Anyway, this week was no exception to the general rule. I saw two films while at home, both with my family (or, at least, significant portions thereof). Those films, and my impressions (WARNING: may contain spoilers):
***
"Ray" This movie was both better than, and more-or-less the same as, I thought it would be.
The better: Jamie Foxx is actually quite good. His performance is an excellent impersonation - you're really able to suspend your disbelief as to the guy onscreen actually
being Ray Charles, in a way that I at least never felt about Will Smith's much-ballyhooed performance as Muhammad Ali. It's more than that, though: it's genuinely good acting, as is most of the rest of the acting in the picture.
The anticipated: the "dramatic action" (
am I using that term correctly?) of the movie is a convoluted, treacly mess. The movie tracks both Charles' rise to musical stardom and his descent into heroin addiction. With neat psychoanalytic precision, each of these is assigned a figure from Charles' past: the rise is his mother, who admonished a young Ray as she was sending him to a boarding school for the blind to "never let nobody make you into no cripple"; the descent his younger brother, whose death Ray blames himself for not preventing. This has a certain internal logic, but it just rings false to me. I mean:
~ It's possible that Charles became a heroin addict because of the death of his younger brother. But isn't it equally possible that he became a heroin addict because he was a jazz musician who worked in the 40s and 50s? Surely
Charlie Parker,
Miles Davis,
John Coltrane, and
Billie Holiday, smack addicts all, didn't all have kid brothers who drowned before their eyes. They became heroin addicts because a) heroin was chic in the circles they traveled in, so they tried it, and b) heroin is an incredibly addictive drug. No complicated psychological traumas required.
~ With regard to the impact of his heroin addiction on his life, the movie's left hand doesn't know what its right hand is doing. There's a classic "show, don't say" problem in the picture. Towards the end of the movie, we're told, by a mental-construct version of Ray's mother, that he's allowed heroin to make him into a cripple. Taken in isolation, this is a sensible claim: drug addiction can indeed be crippling to the people it strikes.
The problem is that very little else in the movie suggests that Ray Charles
was, in fact, crippled by his addiction. We see lots of images of him scratching himself, to show that he's got the "junkie itch", but other than that he seems to be in good health throughout the picture. He continues to be a consummate professional as a performer, not missing performances and continuing to get perfect recordings in the studio in just one take. In what are supposedly the darkest days of his addiction, he starts a successful business. We're told that heroin is destroying his family, though it's not clear why heroin, as opposed to the demands of his touring schedule, is responsible for his missing his son's Little League games. He has some run-ins with the law, but these are relatively easily disposed of, and at any rate are presented not as the end result of his "hitting bottom" but rather as lawless persecution by uptight authorities who fear white children will be corrupted by his "devil-music".
If anything, his heroin use is depicted as a largely harmless personal indulgence - like his taste for Bols gin and marijuana,
both of which he apparently continued to enjoy in large quantities even after he'd disembarked from the H-train - one that was only a problem when used as a pretext by racist, quasi-fascist police to harass him. Indeed, though the movie dares not criticize its subject for them, Ray Charles' serial womanizing and overwhelming desire to succeed, not his heroin addiction, are the forces tearing his life apart. It's his habit of making mistresses of his backup singers that threatens to break up his marriage, and disrupts the functioning of his band by alienating and driving away his once-favored concubines as they find themselves replaced. His endless touring schedule is what alienates him from his children, and his near-obsessive need to accumulate wealth and success is what separates him from his early patrons at Atlantic Records and his former friends in the band.
Of course, these aren't problems that can be overcome with a stint in rehab and a psychoanalytic break-through. And indeed, they don't seem to have been "problems" Ray Charles felt he needed to overcome at all. And so the movie misapprehends itself, telling one story while telling you it's telling another.
***
"The Incredibles I liked this movie a great deal, so much so that I won't go on and on as I did with "Ray". Just two things:
One: What I like best about Pixar movies (which, to a one, I love, though I haven't seen "Toy Story 2") is that, while they fill them with in-jokes just for the adults ("The Incredibles" has an especially cute one - the villain's henchmen trying to devise a drinking game to play while watching the doomsday device attack the city) grown-ups don't have to spend the whole time leaping from one adult joke to the next. Pixar films have actually engrossing plots, interesting characters, themes, etc etc., just like a real movie. Adults can enjoy the whole thing, rather than just the islands of maturity in a sea of kid's stuff. Compare to, say, "Shrek 2", which was pretty light on stuff to appeal to anyone over 12, except for a couple of throwaway one-liners.
Two: I think a lot of the talk about "The Incredibles" being some kind of conservative (or worse, Nietzschean) attack on the educational establishment's recent moves to strip the lives of children of competition in the name of self-esteem (banning dodgeball, doing away with valedictorians and class rankings) is a bit overblown. This idea finds its origins in a series of passages from the movie itself:
HELEN PARR: Everybody's special.
DASH PARR: Which is another way of saying no-one is.
and
BOB PARR: They keep finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity.
as well as the fact that the villain's scheme involves eventually selling his inventions, which have given him the equivalent of super powers, so that someday
SYNDROME: Everyone can be super!
I understand where the people promoting this idea are coming from, but I think there's a much simpler, and better, explanation for these lines than the promotion of a certain political idea. That is: it's what's appropriate for characters in that situation to say.
If you were a superhero, forced to live underground and forbidden to use your powers, you, like Mr. Incredible or Dash, would probably become frustrated with your fate pretty quickly. Unable to deal with those frustrations constructively, you might come to blame the "normals" around you: if only they weren't so pathetic, so weak, you wouldn't be straight-jacketed, forced to play down to their level, humiliated. I don't especially care whether "Incredibles" director Brad Bird does or does not agree with this proposition. What matters is that I believe the characters agree with it, and I do. The end of the movie, in which Dash runs in a track meet but doesn't try his hardest, so as not to embarrass the other children, I think confirms my point. The oft-quoted words aren't some kind of manifesto for letting the talented achieve what they may, whatever the consequences for the mediocre. They're the angry words of frustrated former- and would-be superheros, neither more nor less.
