***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell, Harry Lennix, Aunjanue Ellis, Sharon Warren, Bokeem Woodbine, Curtis Armstrong, Larenz Tate, and Warwick Davis
Directed by Taylor Hackford & written by Hackford and James L. White, with photography by Pawel Edelman
2004
153 min PG13
The backbone of “Ray” is stuff we’ve seen before: a musician rises from nothing, becomes famous and powerful, abuses his power with women and/or drugs, and finds his way again, often thanks to a woman. “Ray” is elevated not by innovation but being a job well done. There are those who say that Ray Charles’s brilliance wasn’t so much in innovation but in professionalism, in being a solid craftsman and a shrewd businessman. So perhaps a smooth, slick, and conventional production, using all the means in the contemporary Hollywood arsenal, is fitting. The movie not only features Jamie Foxx’s now-famous portrayal of the late musician, but also recreates the world in which he lived on a canvas that is rich and wide, yet feels like we can touch it.
In the spotlight is Foxx, who is so good that when we see the real Ray Charles at the end we think he looks strange. Anyone who’s ever turned on a television probably knows plenty about Charles’s voice and mannerisms, but Foxx never seems to be doing an imitation. The character he plays appears to be his own creation, although intellectually we know this isn’t the case.
“We call it country dumb,” he explains to a city boy, as if some of the shuffling, apologetic stuttering is an act, throwing his instances of blank ruthlessness—with women and with business—into greater relief. The man is very much formed by his mother (Sharon Warren), a wiry, loud, and aggressive woman whom poverty has transformed into the embodiment of the phrase “I must be cruel to be kind.” When we see him going blind as a child, her struggle is to keep from coddling him and to make sure that he will be able to survive on his own, even if he trips, falls, and sobs for her help. Ray seems to learn the lesson too well. He grows machine-like and distrusting under his affable exterior. Heroin becomes his confidant, because he can’t find a human one, and creating a recording empire is not so much ambition or greed as his idea of the only way to stay afloat when people inevitably steal or take advantage of him. When we consider how much womanizing, heroin, and general financial pettiness there is in “Ray,” it’s amazing to think how the real Charles gave “Ray” his complete approval just before his death.
“Ray” is also a detailed document of black America in the first half of the last century. Here is a world that existed not too long ago, a barefoot, Jim Crow South, and now it’s gone, and the movies usually don’t give us more than a peek through rickety wooden walls into the lives of sharecroppers and washerwomen. In “Ray,” we don’t spend as much time in the fields, farms, and dirt roads as we would with Terence Malick, Toni Morrison, or David Gordon Green, but it’s more than just a few seconds of historical color paraded across the background.
As Ray moves North and into the urban concert circuit, we sample that giant breath of fresh air that must have swept over Southern blacks as they immigrated to places like Harlem and Chicago in the first half of the century. If you’re reading this right now, then you will probably spend your entire life amidst cars, cities, and suburbs. Part of the vanished world that “Ray” creates is a whole generation that experienced wagons and outhouses in the same lifetime as the moon landing and the historically unprecedented dissemination of electronic media. The effect on those who lived it must have been dizzying.
From the South Ray moves to the life of the professional road musician, and “Ray” is just as detailed when it comes to nightclubs, rest stops, endless sweaty hours on buses, and how and when the musicians are paid. Ray’s first tour doesn’t stop at restaurants nearly as often as at houses along the way. There is a lot of talk of booking performances, percentages, and who owns which rights and which master tapes. As Ray spends more and more time in the studio, we are exposed to the inner workings of rehearsals and emerging recording technologies. We are flooded with managers, publicists, agents, producers, and technicians. Charles is hailed as the creator of soul music, that is, the combination of rhythm & blues with gospel, but if the differences between the offspring and its progenitors strikes you as subtle, that’s only because of how pervasive and intermingled the genres have become.
Ray outgrows one record company and goes to another, and the predominantly black picture is now flooded with white audiences and executives. A road-wise manager is replaced with one who has seen the world and knows how concert halls and arenas should work. Again, what is the background in most films of this sort is given to us with greater depth and clarity. If “Days of Heaven” practically teaches us how to work a farm, then “Ray” does the same with managing pop musicians in the 1950s and ‘60s.
The ass-busting lifestyle of the working musician is made worthwhile by the concerts. Toe-tapping musical numbers like “Hit the Road Jack” fly us up and down rehearsal spaces and nightclubs, from Ray pounding the keys, to people on the dancefloor, to back-up singers, to the appreciative nods of his handlers, to the wind players swaying in unison. The film’s theatrical trailer is a good example of how exciting “Ray” is simply as a musical. Movies set over decades usually have a tendency to get slogged down as the decades go by, but director Taylor Hackford has taken a few pages from Scorsese and moves the years at the same pace as the music.
Page two of "Ray" (2004). Back to home.