Ray
Director: Taylor Hackford
Writers: Screen story by Taylor Hackford and James L. White, screenplay by James L. White
Producers: Taylor Hackford, Stuart Benjamin, Howard Baldwin, Karen Elise Baldwin
Stars: Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Sharon Warren, Clifton Powell, Bokeem Woodbine, Harry J. Lennix, Aunjanue Ellis, Curtis Armstrong, Richard Schiff, Larenz Tate

A movie and a life always make strange bedfellows; my gut call would be that there’s a lower ratio of excellent biopics than nearly any other genre in filmmaking. Sure, you have the attraction of a famous name, and the opportunity for award-friendly acting. But it’s hard finding defining emotional and dramatic shape in messy real lives. It’s even harder when the life in question is one so many people are invested in that there’s immense pressure to fit in all those highlights.

Ask yourself what a challenge it would be making one mix album to summarize Ray Charles, whose genius crossed so many genres and embraced so many stories and moods. The cumbersome weight of expectations throws Ray seriously off-balance. You are left learning a great deal about the life of the artist – in fact, most of what a good timeline would tell you. But after trying to jam in so much data, we leave strangely unenthralled despite the extraordinary efforts of Jamie Foxx in the title role.

Make no mistake, Foxx’s work is as good as that of any lead actor this year – from his first moments on screen he not only embodies the physicality so familiar to us, but the music and mischief in the soul of Ray Charles Robinson. He may be lip-synching, but trying to replace the real thing would be hubristic folly. The point is not to replicate what Ray did (though Foxx shows ample piano chops), but to depict the person he was. And the person he was – playful and stubborn, mistrusting and desperate for love, gregarious and distant, compassionate and cruel – is not papered over.

The movie starts in the early years of his traveling young adulthood, playing and singing for his supper. His ability to mimic any musical style that enters his ear keeps him working, his blindness invites people to exploit him, so regularly that he starts insisting he be paid entirely in $1 bills, so he can count them.

But he was raised to expect this, and we skip off and on into flashback, where we see the ferocity with which his mother Aretha (a stunning Sharon Warren) carved out a living for herself and her sons, even as a disease slowly took his vision.

Aretha saw life as a fight you could never shrink from, and drilled into Ray that he may be blind, but that was no excuse to be a cripple. In one scene that blessedly plays out long enough to really reach our heartstrings (instead of the bullet point approach taken in much of the rest of the movie), we watch the young Ray trip over a chair in their one-room house and cry for his mother to help him off the floor. But she just stands and watches, silent and tearful and defiant, as he cries himself out, then gradually uses his hands, his memory, and most importantly, his ears, to orient himself.

And while he learned to live without his eyes, the sights they did see haunt him – most particularly that day he stood paralyzed on the ground and watched his brother (Terrell Jones) drown in a washtub. What’s most important about the funeral is not the expected emotional breakdown of the mother, but the crowd – they sing. They sing loud and soulful, and the people walking Aretha to the coffin sing loudest of all. They sing that they may raise themselves above the pain.

Ray sings, and plays, but by the time he finds his wife-to-be Della Bea (Kerry Washington), who encourages him to break out of mimicry and find his own voice, he has already spent years submerging the pain of his life with addictions – to heroin and to women. Neither will he give up easily.

But the music was, and still is, so so special. From early hits like Mess Around (a tune I always connect with Planes, Trains and Automobiles, where John Candy did a joyful pantomime to it as Steve Martin snored next to him) through groundbreaking gospel/R&B fusions like I’ve Got a Woman, right up through his plaintive orchestral and country records like Georgia on my Mind and I Can’t Stop Loving You, this movie takes full advantage of the vast and powerful catalog of its subject.

But what was most astonishing about Ray Charles was not that he was blind, or that he survived so many years of addiction, or that he took stands against racism and closed-mindedness, but that in one song after another, across one style after another, he was able to channel his feelings and awaken us to them. Sadly, about halfway through the sense settles in that there are simply too many hits to address, even at 2½ hours the movie feels hurried (especially a jarring and abrupt ending), and you end up experiencing little more powerful than the blurp of satisfied curiosity.

Oh, I think, so that’s why the female vocalist sounds so authentically angry in “Hit the Road, Jack”. And that’s how the seminal hit “What’d I Say?” evolved to be so long that it was split into two parts for release. I wanted to be taken on the journey, instead I saw the map and the highlight photos.

Ray Charles’ music, along with Foxx’s performance (another giant leap forward in a year where he already triumphed in Collateral) is enough to recommend this movie in spite of its ultimate shortcomings. But those songs weren’t about telling you how he felt, it was about bringing you inside it through the power of his voice and the spirit of his piano. Taylor Hackford is never less then competent in his handling of the material, and he achieves a great deal on what was clearly an unforgivably tight budget. The cast he assembles is top-to-bottom excellent (and yes, that’s Curtis Armstrong, Revenge of the Nerds’ Booger, all but unrecognizable as Charles’ early producer Ahmet Ertegun). But in his attempt to do full credit to an extraordinary life, it’s his form of completeness that ends up shortchanging it.

Collateral
Director: Michael Mann
Writer: Stuart Beattie
Producers: Michael Mann, Julie Richardson
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Bruce McGill

Nobody shoots Los Angeles like director Michael Mann (Thief, Heat). The skyscrapers look like Monument Valley in steel and glass. The freeways, shot from directly overhead, look like blood veins pulsing life around a mutated organism.

Vincent (Tom Cruise) doesn’t like it. He thinks it’s too spread out, too disconnected. Of course, what he disdains about it is also what makes it an ideal work environment for him. He can shoot two people dead in an alleyway and, with a quick look around, confirm that no one’s running to call the police.

He considers himself a professional doing a job; nothing more, nothing less. But he’s in denial of his true nature. He’s a virus, injected on this night into the body of Los Angeles to transform and/or destroy anyone he comes in contact with, until he triumphs or is eradicated.

Cruise has shown off action chops before, in the Mission: Impossible movies it has always been too preening; showboat-y acrobatics for showboat-y movies. Here he’s sleek, lethally efficient, rarely wasting movement or time in killing. Like Toshiro Mifune in the seminal deadly-samurai movie Yojimbo, Cruise has his game down enough that Mann can show him dispatching multiple targets in an unbroken shot, and we’re wowed by his simple craftsmanship.

But like another recent Los Angeles two-hander, Training Day, the story of Collateral does not belong to the scene-stealing villain, but to the innocent brought unwittingly into his element. Max (Jamie Foxx) is a good taxi driver – he keeps his cab clean, doesn’t waste time to jack up his fare, and can even tell you to the minute when you will reach your destination. He believes in doing a job well, but never imagined he’d be at this one long enough to be this good at it.

He’s pleasant, doesn’t challenge people, tells himself he’s simply biding his time until he can put away the money to start his limo service. He has the air of someone who will really listen to you, so people who need to talk have a way of opening up around him. Collateral often takes the form of a series of splendid character vignettes – the first a subtly romantic ride where Max soothes the nerves of a federal prosecutor (Jada Pinkett Smith) pulling an all-nighter to prepare for a big case. In a matter of minutes, the two realize they click on a deeper level than either could have predicted, and we get to watch it because Mann is so expertly patient.

But Vincent is Max’s next passenger, and he’s just as impressed with his driver’s punctuality, though for different reasons. He drops a wad of cash to hire Max out for the whole night; he offers casually that he has “five stops to make” before he needs to be back at the airport.

Once Max realizes what the game is, he has to progress from not wanting to help Vincent work, to feeling like he has no choice, to desperately seeking a means to change the situation. Meanwhile, an ambitious cop (Mark Ruffalo) is following the trail of bodies and suspecting there is an angle to what’s going on that the FBI and other cops are not considering.

To Vincent, Max has been sized up as no threat. And yet they’re bound together for this night, and so he lies, cajoles and threatens, even helps Max (encouraging him to stand up to his boss, buying flowers for his bed-ridden mother) if it will keep him together long enough to drive to the next stop. He doesn’t realize just how much by doing this, he’s toughening Max up enough to be a threat.

Vincent says, suggestively, that he has been at this for six years “in the private sector”. Max is terrified and confused that a creature like Vincent could exist. And yet, we get glimpses of a private side – Vincent tells a story about his childhood that he admits is at least part a lie, though maybe not that much. And, in another great moment devoted to character, he spares the life of one of his targets (Barry Shabaka Henley) for a few minutes so they can talk about Miles Davis. This movie lingers on faces in a way American movies don’t too often anymore, and it’s a breath of fresh air.

Max and Vincent’s conversations in the cab dominate the action, and there are times that Stuart Beattie’s script circles back on familiar streets. After awhile we know the score between these two, and don’t need to be reminded. But the two leads are good enough, connected enough in their unholy way, that it gets by.

Jamie Foxx has been building himself an enviable resume of “serious actor” roles in recent years, and it’s about time that people took notice. In every scene he is Cruise’s equal, brave enough to show the details of someone who’s quietly surrendered 12 years of his life to being the one who knows where to get off the 110 to avoid traffic. He doesn’t take on the trappings of the little guy and wink as if to say “don’t worry, Jamie’s still under here!” He simply is Max, the little guy.

Cruise has never been as transformative an actor but has instead worked from a base kit of movie star persona tics and built for the occasion. We still get the clenched laughs, the head tilts, the sarcastic eye-widening – but in a perverse way, Vincent channels his usual cocksure energy in a way we might never have imagined working so ideally.

There’s another aspect to the way Mann (along with cinematographers Paul Cameron and Dion Beebe) shoots this movie that distinguishes it. Most of the “film” is really high-definition digital video, unprecedented in a movie of this size that doesn’t have the words “Star” and “Wars” in the title. It’s unexpected for a thriller set at night, since the chief criticisms of digital video are its clumsiness with dark colors and a blurring effect that can happen with too much camera movement. Both are on display here, which will likely anger purists and eye candy junkies.

I prefer film over digital, but I have to admit, when you take this movie in the way Mann is showing it, there’s a hypnotic quality. The lights become haloed but the whole world seems dimmer and washed-out. I’ve walked around Los Angeles very tired and very late at night, and I look at Collateral and think, yeah, it does kind of feel like that. Michael Mann clearly knows this.