Originally published 11/17/04
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.