Making jazz out of the confusion

Rating: Null/10 (15 January 2014)

What is it like to search for meaning? We turn to the world to find it, but that's a world of blind accident ruled by narratives of success, sooner or later it disappoints. Scorsese's films take place in that world. I'm after films that turn inwards to see if maybe we were carrying it with us all along. Films about music, jazz in particular, are ideal.
Here the outer world where Ray played shows exactly those things, accident, hurt and the quest to be someone that copes by overcoming. That world hurts, promises, disappoints, one mistress after another while still wanting to feel close to the loving wife. The handling of the cinematic world, tied to American music and politics and the change that sweeps both after the war, is sprawling and anchorless, the same way that Scorsese does his own biopics: lots and lots of stuff in the effort to get the full chronicle.
But it's what this man was carrying with him all along that has the capacity to fulfill. It's sensitivity he cultivates, to sound, to the world at large, with genius being only the incidental flow, because an old man in the sharecropping place of childhood happened to have a piano, because he practiced hard and cultivated the urge. It's being able to tune yourself to hear the hummingbird's song out the window. Beauty as the perseverance to active involvement, not giving up to the confusion of life but making jazz out of it.
This could have been a marvelous film. Foxx is sublime. The music is sublime. But it kind of all hangs together as the chronicle around this man, sticking to the outer noise of things. I miss the man at his piano as intuition comes to him, which is the center of all else. How would that translate visually? One of the most difficult tasks in film.