Movie Review
"Ray": mesmerizing music, fantastic Foxx

By Paul de Barros
Seattle Times jazz critic

NICOLA GOODE Director Taylor Hackford, left, and Jamie Foxx on the set of "Ray."

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Taylor Hackford's new biopic, "Ray," about iconic American soul singer Ray Charles, will thrill anyone who has been hit like a ton of bricks by the excitement and raw electricity of Charles' music. Jamie Foxx's uncannily accurate portrayal of the singer and his songs may well earn him an Oscar nomination, as well.

However, the film's psychobiographical story line and the nightmare flashbacks invented to "explain" Charles' life render what might have been a great film into a merely good one.

At over two hours, it runs a little long, too.

Best things first.

Foxx really is Ray Charles. He gets the rocking, blind man's walk, the "heh-heh-heh" hesitation of Charles' speech, his playful sense of humor, his lecherous hands — and the dark, interior, don't-mess-with-me privateness of this musician hardened by the road.

To get the part right, Foxx reportedly spent up to 14 hours a day with prosthetics pasted over his eyelids, a device modeled on a photograph of Charles' actual eyelids, as well as studying films of Charles as a young man. A trained musician, Foxx lip-synchs so perfectly you never doubt for a moment it's Charles singing and, bless him, actually fingers the right keys in the piano sequences.

Unlike so many biopics, the film is unsparing about Charles' faults. He was a lover and a romantic and a soul man but also ambitious, sometimes paranoid, a con artist, philanderer and junkie who willingly participated in the foul glory of the music business.

We even get the (apparently true) moment in the studio when the great Atlantic Records producer Ahmet Ertegun (Curtis Armstrong) cajoled Ray into finding his true voice. The sweaty close-ups in the studio and in the dives, the infights of the backup singers (Regina King is excellent as Raelette Margie Hendricks), the glamour and lights of the big halls — they're all there, and so are you.

Movie review Showtimes and trailer *** "Ray," with Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Clifton Powell, Aunjanue Ellis, Harry Lennix, Terrence Dashon Howard, Larenz Tate, Sharon Warren, Richard Schiff and Regina King. Directed by Taylor Hackford, story by Hackford and James L. White, screenplay by White. 152 minutes. Rated PG-13 for depiction of drug addiction, sexuality and some thematic elements. Several theaters.

"Ray" doesn't objectify and valorize African-American culture with the romantic outsiderism common to most films about black music (Hackford is white, screenplay writer James L. White is black), though black critics ultimately will be the best judge of that.

With such a well-informed team, it's all the more puzzling that Hackford inserts an epic dimension into Charles' life that wasn't there.

I mean, here's a guy who was poor, black and blind, got rich and famous, invented a new kind of popular music and turned the record business on its ear. This isn't a good enough story?

Apparently not. No, the "real" story is a textbook Freudian psychological thriller that suggests Charles had to come to terms with his guilt over watching his brother accidentally drown in a washtub.

Now, the flashbacks to the rural South, in which Charles' mother (played sharply by Sharon Warren) admonishes her son never to act like a "cripple" are excellent and accurate. But the florid, nightmare flashbacks of the drowning incident and a dream sequence that resolves the trauma are just corny. The cumulative effect of this approach is a kind of dishonesty much worse than the many small distortions that permeate the film, a sort of Oprah Winfrey triumphalism in which all people are expected to confront — and overcome — their demons.

Sure, Ray Charles kicked his heroin habit. But it's unlikely he confronted his other demons. Creative, imaginative, courageous and joyful, yes, but he also was controlling, opportunistic, notorious for ill treatment of sidemen and, far from the Civil Rights hero Hackford portrays, made big bucks playing Sun City before apartheid ended.

In other words, Charles was a complex figure whose life doesn't fit into this tidy little story.

But, hey, enjoy the music — and Foxx. They're terrific.

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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