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Right as 'Ray'
Here's how good Jamie Foxx is in "Ray": For the duration of the film's 2 hours, it never once crosses your mind that you're watching an actor play Ray Charles.
The big black sunglasses help, and so does the fact that every time Foxx opens his mouth to sing, it's Charles's voice we hear. But the performance is more than that: Foxx gets the hurry of the man who invented soul music, the nervous energy that flows up his hunched shoulders and out his fingertips, the twist of the smile and the hepcat insistence of his speech. He convinces you of Brother Ray's sightlessness, of his weaknesses for women and the needle, and, above all, of the volcanic talent that slammed together different genres of music until something new was forged.
It's a good thing Foxx does all this, because the movie doesn't. Directed by Taylor Hackford ("An Officer and a Gentleman," "Proof of Life"), "Ray" isn't hackwork, but it's not too far off, either. The structural model is the Modern Black Biopic as established by "Malcolm X" and "What's Love Got to Do With It," and the script (by James L. White, from a story by White and Hackford and input from Charles himself) straps an unruly life to a Therapy 101 framework that's far too pat. Maybe Ray Charles did shoot junk to escape his guilt over his brother's accidental death in childhood. But I imagine there might have been one or two other factors as well.
What "Ray" gets right, and then some, is the music. Charles may have achieved mainstream fame (i.e., a white audience) in the mid-1960s with crossover smashes such as "Georgia on My Mind" and "I Can't Stop Loving You," but even before his death in June the growing consensus was that it was the singer's 1950s hits for Atlantic that were the real, revolutionary deal. With the songs "I've Got a Woman," "What'd I Say," and "Hallelujah I Love Her So," Charles married gospel piano and vocals to lust-filled lyrics -- he fused Saturday night and Sunday morning -- and the results hit the R&B charts like a bomb.
There's a scene midway through "Ray" in which Charles and his band are tearing up a nightclub, and a church-going couple brings the party to a halt with a horrified lecture about mixing salvation with sin. Charles just sits behind his piano and shrugs -- he knows exactly what he's doing -- but one of his band members sees the light and walks off the stage. It bears repeating: For the majority of black audiences of the time, this music was wrong. And they couldn't stop listening to it.
Hackford delivers the goods throughout the first half of "Ray," expertly detailing the singer's early career in Seattle and on the chitlin circuit, where his fame won him a recording contract, with first Swingtime and then Atlantic. The film covers the efforts of dapper Atlantic chief Ahmet Ertegun (Curtis Armstrong, unrecognizable and excellent) and producer Jerry Wexler (Richard Schiff) to move Charles away from Nat King Cole imitations toward his own sound.
"Ray" presents that sound as a spontaneous eruption, with the great early Charles hits arising from conversation, inspiration, and moments when the singer is in a jam. At times this gimmick turns absurd, as when Charles is arguing bitterly with one of his girlfriends and suddenly comes up with "Hit the Road, Jack." She joins in, and for audiences, it's a Mickey-and-Judy moment of surpassing weirdness.
Hackford also regularly flashes back to the singer's childhood in northern Florida, where his single mother (Sharon Warren) copes with the drowning death of her youngest boy and then steels Ray for the hard life ahead after glaucoma takes his eyesight at age 7. A scene in which the mother silently watches her son stumble with growing confidence through the house, listening, is a heartbreaker.
Otherwise (and at odds with the public image), the film portrays its subject as something of a bastard: a man who hardly saw his adoring wife (Kerry Washington) and children because he was constantly on tour, where he shot up with fellow musicians like sax player David "Fathead" Newman (Bokeem Woodbine) and had a succession of "road wives" such as Mary Anne Fisher (Aunjanue Ellis) and Margie Hendricks (Regina King).
This was not unknown. The old joke about Charles was that you could be a Raelette only if you'd "let Ray," but while that line's in the movie, its waggish inclusion only serves to absolve him. "Ray" argues that heroin and women were demanding mistresses, but that the singer's first love was always and forgivably music.
By the second half, when Charles signs with ABC Records, starts cranking out the pop hits, and worries about selling out, the film has run out of dramatic incident. It touches on the civil rights struggle and the singer's heroin busts, but spends far too much time on the rivalry between his two managers (played by Clifton Powell and Harry Lennix). That's right: "Ray" comes down to a fight within the entourage.
Worse, the final scenes tie the story up in a neat bow of Hollywood half-truths. Hackford gives us a ridiculous therapeutic "closure" scene in which Ray comes to terms with his past, then suggests the singer was clean, sober, and faithful for the rest of his life. In fact, he and his wife divorced bitterly in 1976, and while Charles never touched heroin again, he gladly partook of gin and weed until the end of his days.
He was, in other words, a more complicated man than this film, or perhaps any film, dares allow. Foxx is not at fault here -- with "Ray," he arrives at the front ranks of American film actors -- but the filmmakers' need to bend biography until it assumes triumphal shape is. This movie forgets that Ray Charles didn't just crow "It's Alright," he also sang "Drown in My Own Tears," and he meant every inconsolable word.
By Wesley Morris
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