Taylor Hackford’s RAY does what the best of biopics should do, tell not just who someone is, or what someone has done, but the why behind it all, in this case Ray Charles. Based on his decades of knowing the man himself, Hackford takes facts and mixes them with a healthy dose of poetic license to splendid effect. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of Charles rise from unimaginable poverty to fame and fortune. Incidents in his life coalesce using the framework of the man’s music to move the story along, both the personal and the professional as the gradual synthesis of the musical traditions with which he grew up turned into the unique sound that made Charles a legend. The performance Jamie Foxx gives as Charles may just make him a legend of sorts, too.
Foxx hasn’t just worked up an imitation of the man, his tics, his quirky body language, and the rough velvet of the voice. He’s captured the essence of Charles enormous personal magnetism and his intense capacity for life, a razor-sharp mind cloaked in what he termed country dumb, his playful innocence mixed with a callousness all the more disturbing in contrast. If fate robbed him of his sight at age seven, it wasn’t just his other four senses that compensated. Charles, as channeled by Foxx, becomes a vessel of pure joy, abject sorrow, and everything in between.
It begins with Charles’ mother, Aretha (an arresting Sharon Warren), face pinched with determination and the hardscrabble life of a sharecropper, telling her son to never let anyone treat him like a cripple. And it’s that fierceness, seen in intermittent flashbacks, that becomes the driving force on Charles life. Not that he doesn’t use his blindness to his advantage when necessary, playing on the sympathies of the pretty girls he meets on the road (he determines pulchritude by feeling their wrists), or telling a state trooper in 1948 that he lost his eyes in World War II in order to be allowed on the bus that will take him away from Florida and into music history. If Hackford plays fast and loose with some specifics, it’s to create cinematic moments that represent a story too complex to take only two and one-half hours of screen time, never mind getting to the heart of what drove Charles. Hence we see Charles falling out of bed after his first romantic interlude with his future wife (a tough and tender Kerry Washington) to play a newly minted brand of Gospel-tinged R&B that the experience has inspired. Did it happen just that way? Why let facts get in the way of the emotional truth of the moment? Hackford also uses a hallucinatory conceit of water to get at the trauma in Charles childhood that reverberated throughout his life. The magical realism, sparing but intense, makes the pain palpable.
The script, written by James L. White from the story by White and Hackford, concentrates on giving the audience the flavor of Charles’ life, rather than giving a slavish recounting of its timeline. And there is the unmistakable subtext throughout about the power of music as a vehicle of social change and the reaction of those who thought the status quo was just fine. It’s significant that the only time races are shown mixing in strictly segregated times and places is when music is the priority, whether pointedly, as with a racist concert promoter leading Charles into a concert hall, albeit past civil rights protesters, or with a group of decidedly white-bread teenagers rocking down with Charles’ cross-over hit, the distinctly sexual “What I Say? as adults look on with a more than baleful eye.
There’s no sugar coating here of the dark side of Charles life, the womanizing that broke his wife’s heart, not to mention the hearts of the string of women he left in his wake, or the drug addiction that nearly brought down his career, or the acquiescence to Jim Crow for so many years before the epiphany that may or may not have triggered the drug prosecutions. Instead, it evolves as a seamless, almost mythic tale about one man’s remarkable journey.
Your Thoughts?