a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
Director – Taylor Hackford.
Writer: James L. White, based on a story by Hackford and White.
Director of photography – Pawel Edelman.
Editor – Paul Hirsch.
Music – Ray Charles.
Score – Craig Armstrong.
Production designer – Stephen Altman.
Producers – -Howard Baldwin, Karen Baldwin, Taylor Hackford, and Stuart Benjamin.
Released by Universal Pictures.
152 minutes. Rated PG-13 for sexual references, harsh language, and portrayals of drug use.
STARRING: Jamie Foxx (Ray Charles), Kerry Washington (Della Bea Robinson), Clifton Powell (Jeff Brown), Aunjanue Ellis (Mary Ann Fisher), Harry Lennix (Joe Adams), Larenz Tate (Quincy Jones), Sharon Warren (Mother) and Regina King (Margie Hendricks).
You’re already hearing the Oscar buzz rising in response to Jamie Foxx’s performance as Ray Charles. And while Foxx’s work in Michael Mann’s Collateral is actually a more complicated and subtle, there’s no denying that in Taylor Hackford’s Ray he successfully rises he rises to a challenge that would rightly intimidate most actors. He makes manifest the great singer/songwriter without singing a single false note. It’s easy to believe that Ray Charles himself would have been pleased with the performance.
And yet, while Ray reveals the genius of the artist and many of the details, the strengths, and the weaknesses of the man, Hackford also conceals a great deal: including Ray Charles’ first wife and almost all of his children.
In spite of its shortcomings, Ray is worth seeing, not just for Foxx, but for the rest of the cast, the music, the cinematography (by The Pianist’s cinematographer, Pawel Edelman), and the portrait of an artist as a conflicted composer. Like Milos Forman’s Amadeus, Ray reminds us that talent and genius have little if anything to do with wisdom. We come away from the film dazzled by the show, grateful for the gift, and sobered by the consequences of reckless behavior.
The script by James L. White focuses on the ’50s and ’60s, the years covering Charles’ meteoric rise to fame and simultaneous descent into drug addiction and the consequences of infidelity. We follow him from his first encounter with a young Quincy Jones in Seattle, to his spirited recording sessions with Atlantic Records, to his uncanny works of reinvention with ABC/Paramount Records. The traumatic and significant chapters of his childhood are presented in vivid flashbacks that do wonders to reveal the events that formed the adult.
But the focus is on the music, and Hackford’s film stands beside Amadeus in its exceptional generosity with the material that made the man famous. Thankfully, the live performances are acted out over the actual recording of Charles’ real voice. Recordings you know by heart are reborn when you see the furnace in which they were forged. Titles like “What I’d Say,” “Hit the Road Jack,” and “Georgia On My Mind” come alive with contagious energy; you may find it difficult to remain in your seat. You’ll have a hard time sitting still when the band, asked to play more than they’ve prepared, spontaneously invent one of Charles’ greatest hits, “What I’d Say.” Hackford does a great job of capturing the enthusiasm at the edge of chaos during Charles’ concerts. He may have been a country-music boy at heart, but in front of a crowd, this guy was a rock star.
The cast invest the project with humor, intensity, and personality, each actor’s work standing as a tribute. C.J. Sanders brings a solemn intelligence to the young Ray Charles Robinson, and he successfully pulls off some of the film’s heaviest scenes. Ray’s mother, played by Sharon Warren, seems a bit idealized, but she too delivers in some big, dramatic moments. Clifton Powell (Woman, Thou Art Loosed) is also strong as the man Charles entrusts with keeping the band together on the road.
It’s a pleasant surprise to see Warwick Davis … yes, the guy who played Wicket the Ewok (Return of the Jedi) and Willow … in a small role where he actually gets to play an interesting, believable, real-world character. Curtis Armstrong, a cult-comedy legend for his appearances in Better Off Dead and TV’s Moonlighting, turns up as an agent for Atlantic Records and emerges as an industry man with a heart and a healthy sense of humor.
Kerri Washington plays Della Bee, Ray’s second wife … but the film cheats us by portraying her as the first and only. She does a wonderful job of avoiding the shrill tone that often characterizes the big-screen spouse of a cultural hero. In fact, it’s one of Hackford’s most admirable choices to portray her as the right side of every argument that she has with Ray. At least the film is willing to admit something of the dark side of Charles’ personality. He’s mistreating “Bee,” taking advantage of her, betraying her, and instead of giving him excuses, the film holds him responsible.
But the film’s greatest fault is just how much it conceals about the extent of Charles’ betrayals. At times, it takes them too lightly, prodding the audience to laugh at his womanizing. Ray only accounts for one of his illegitimate child, but in a film that gives the appearance of telling the whole story (at 160+ minutes), I can’t help but wonder what Charles’ other ten children are thinking, watching this film with nary a mention of their existence (until the conclusion of the end credits). Moreover, as in A Beautiful Mind, the storytellers give us the impression that the marriage endured the storms when, in fact, after only a few years it collapsed in divorce.
Ray is one of those biographies that wants the stigma of having given us “the life of Ray Charles,” but also wants us to redeem Charles for his sins. That is not the job of a storyteller. That is the job of the people that Charles wronged. If we are to see and appreciate the glory of what Charles achieved, we need also to know what he did to achieve such glory, what prices he paid. It’s not fair to hide from us that his impressive, long-running career came at the expense of more than one marriage, not to mention the wounds inflicted on the hearts of so many apparently trivial children.
In fact, the film is so intent on including all of the highlights that, in spite of Foxx’s impressive work, we barely scratch the surface of the man’s interior life. My suspicion is that devotees of Charles’ music will get much get much closer to the truth of his heart and soul than those who just see the movie and remain casual listeners.
It also fails to explore the controversies he stirred up. When church people are shown protesting the fusion of gospel music with rock-n-roll lyrics, we are coaxed to accept Charles’ defense, which amounts to little more than “If it feels good, I’m going to do it.” That philosophy clearly damages him in other parts of his life, but it would have been interesting to investigate issues of art and ethics more fully.
Those sequences that do take us a few steps into Charles’ perspective and experience make the film well worth the ticket. One chapter stands out for the patience with which Hackford lets it unfold–a scene in which young Ray, having only recently lost his sight, learns to get up and find his way around without his mother’s help. That sequence itself is exhilarating.
But some scenes fall flat. When Hackford explains the origin of a particular chart-topping hit, referenced late in the film, it’s so absurd that film seems to be losing its grip on realism and stumbling into contrived comedy.
And at the end, Hackford seems uncomfortable with the raw, open wound of Charles’ life, and so he tries cleaning it up with a TV-movie-quality dream sequence that is more about sending us out of the theatre with a warm glow than it is about being honest to Charles’ experience.
In the end, Ray is too simplistic, too long, too unremarkable as an act of storytelling to become the great film it wants to be. It goes for all of the scenes that make for good highlight reels and melodrama, and overlooks opportunities to give us windows into more mysterious or conflicting corners of Charles life. It belabors the point of his struggle with drugs, and it presents the matter of his infidelities too lightly.
But it does honor the music that Ray Charles gave us. And for those who don’t know his story (I didn’t), it proves a compelling and worthwhile, if incomplete, tour of Charles’ life.