Ray (2004)
Directed by Taylor Hackford
Written by James L. White
Starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Clifton Powell, Harry Lennix, Terrence Howard, Larenz Tate
Release Date October 29th, 2004
Published October 28th, 2004
There is an odd sort of verisimilitude to this week of reviews as we transition from a horror musical review on Wednesday of Rocky Horror Picture Show into a musical biopic which will remain as our theme headed into Friday when we discuss Bohemian Rhapsody, the new Queen and Freddy Mercury biopic being released nationwide this weekend. It’s rather fascinating to consider that these disparate phenomena, Rocky Horror, Ray Charles and Queen were contemporaries of sorts. Each was a facet of our vast popular culture at the same time, available to the same audience in different ways.
The story told in Ray stops well before the stories for Rocky Horror or Queen even begin but by the time they do arrive, Ray is established as one of the stalwart figures of the music business, a warrior who overcomes disability, racism and a drug habit to become an enduring pop institution. The movie Ray gives us that proverbial ‘warts and all’ look at the life and legend of Ray Charles and while the film is on the shaggy side, Jamie Foxx’s lead performance is one of the great performances of this young century.
Ray tells the story of Ray ‘Charles’ Robinson in a sort of a linear fashion. The film is populated by gauzy flashbacks to Ray’s tragic childhood in Northern Florida in the early 1930’s. In the linear story, we meet Ray as he charms and lies his way onto a bus from Florida to Seattle where he has a gig as a pianist waiting for him. Confusingly, the story flips between Ray’s bus ride to Seattle and the gig that got him the cash to go, playing in a redneck country band.
The structure of Ray at times threatens to derail the movie but Jamie Foxx is so remarkable and the music of Ray Charles so indelible and fascinating that it’s too good even for director Taylor Hackford to screw up. We watch as Ray learns valuable lessons about protecting his money, he insists on being paid in singles to assure that his pay was not shortened. We see him learn how not to be taken advantage of by friends and how they should not underestimate him because of his disability.
Finally, we watch with the most fascination as he creates a legendary catalog of hit music. The studio portions of Ray are magical, filmed with an eye for how historic this moment and time must have been. The cuts to Curtis Armstrong’s Ahmet Ertugen and Richard Schiff’s Jerry Wexler as they witnessed Ray cutting legendary songs in a single take capture the pure creativity that infused the music of Ray Charles. You don’t have to love Ray’s fusion of Jazz, Gospel and Pop to recognize music history in the making, his music crossed all possible boundaries.
If it looks easy it’s because Ray Charles always made it look easy. His blindness didn’t matter, he was one of those rare souls infused with music and an untameable talent for creation. In one of the great moments in the film and in music history, we witness Ray improv what would become one of his all time, bestselling classics, “What’d I Say,” as a way of filling time at the end of a gig that had ended too soon in the eyes of the promoter who threatened not to pay Ray and the band.
Some discount Jamie Foxx’s performance as mere mimicry or a broad impression but I don’t think that is fair. Foxx is stuck with a director in Taylor Hackford who has stuck him with a script that undermines him with a series of pop psych level flashbacks to his childhood that are supposed to infuse him with depth but instead come off as awkward and confused. Foxx overcomes this not by committing to those moments but by busting through those moments to get to the heart of Ray Charles.
Foxx captures both the Ray Charles we know, the gyrating, gesticulating, impish performer and the calculating, paranoid addict side of Ray Charles that the public only glimpsed in headlines. Ray could be cruel when he wanted to be, as demonstrated by his marriage and his relationship with various managers and hangers on, people who thought they were perhaps more than just employees but soon found themselves on the outs.
Foxx is incredible at maintaining our sympathy for Ray even as he does terrible things to himself and to his wife, played by Kerry Washington. It’s not that Ray’s behavior isn’t disappointing, along with director Hackford’s lame attempts to explain his behavior via those pop psych flashbacks, but rather that Foxx gives Ray Charles a vulnerability that not only we find irresistible but we can imagine others found irresistible as well. That’s not an easy trick for any actor to pull off, let alone an actor known at the time for sketch and stand-up comedy.
Foxx’s performance is unquestionably rendered better by comparison to the rest of the movie. Taylor Hackford drags out the story with his stumbling, flashbacks and detours, he spends a good deal of time focusing on the homes Ray Charles bought for his family, admiring the architecture and dwelling on the cost in scenes that are rarely necessary for moving the plot forward.
And then there is the treatment of the women in Ray Charles’ life. Taylor Hackford takes a pair of our most talented African American actresses and gives them little to play beyond cliches of the put-upon wife and the neglected mistress. Kerry Washington and Regina King struggle to bring depth to characters that the director appears to view as roadblocks for Ray to navigate in his redemption arc. Foxx doesn’t see them that way but he has no control over how the edit of the movie robs both actresses of moments where they can grow beyond their function to the story as impediments and aids to Ray’s faults and growth.
Ray is thus a mixed bag as a movie and a music biopic but as a showcase for an actor, it’s a remarkable piece of work. Hackford loves Jamie Foxx, he gives his lead actor every opportunity to exercise his limitless ability to capture the Ray Charles of our imagination and something so very real and true about the man. Foxx bites into the role with fervor and a powerhouse level of star-power and charisma. It took an outsized performance to capture the outsized legend and a remarkable talent to bring him into a real life, sympathetic context beyond the legend.
Jamie Foxx delivers a truly iconic performance as Ray Charles. Here’s hoping Rami Malek is able to do the same for Freddy Mercury whose life had some strange parallels with Ray Charles, though Ray was able to overcome his demons in ways that sadly, Freddy never got the chance to do. If Rami Malek can deliver even a fraction of Foxx’s power, we’re in for something great in Bohemian Rhapsody this week.
