Ray (2004)

USA, 152 minutes
Director: Taylor Hackford
Writers: Taylor Hackford, James L. White
Photography: Pawel Edelman
Music: Craig Armstrong, Ray Charles
Editor: Paul Hirsch
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell, Aunjanue Ellis, Harry Lennix, Terrence Dashon Howard, Larenz Tate, Bokeem Woodbine, Sharon Warren, Chris Thomas King, Curtis Armstrong, Kurt Fuller

All right then, one more beloved dead icon of various complex attractions up for our end-of-year delectation. Granted, Ray now happens to be many years old. But it's a product of a reasonably unchanging formula, which has been in place since at least The Glenn Miller Story, and in a way, seeing an older version now sets off the basics in stark relief. Ray is a biopic, most plainly and fundamentally. But also Oscarbait, major career enhancement vehicle, hoaried slice of 20th-century popular culture, heroin cautionary tale, inspiration narrative for the disabled, civil rights story, and a few other things as well. It's trying to hit a lot of notes, pun not intended, with a little bit of sugar for everyone. But here's the kicker: it doesn't matter that much because the little bit of sugar for me (division of invention of rock 'n' roll) in many ways trumps all. Critical acumen, such as it is, goes right out the window. All sins instantly forgiven whenever the music starts to play.

Now I happen to be fond of Ray Charles—as who isn't?—so there was always cause here for both interest and wariness. If we have to wallow in something it might as well be Ray Charles. And for the most part Ray seems to get the basics right. But too often it becomes overly wince-worthy, playing for too-easy emotional effects by springboarding transparently off troubled childhood, dead younger brother, impoverished single mother, Jim Crow South, and the loss of his sight as a youth. Fine and good, because true enough, but in Ray it's just the context for various outrageous, unfortunate exaggerations, which only caricature the man that the film is attempting so self-seriously to canonize, even as it seriously bags what it existed to bag: Best Actor, Best Sound Mixing, and nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editor, and Best Costume Design. Yippee!


Example: Ray Charles is endowed here with super-hearing. He can hear a hummingbird outside the window across a large room! He can hear a cricket stepping across the floor on its scratchy little legs! But there's more! He can also play chess, even under the stress of enforced hospitalization, by feeling the pieces with his fingers. If there had been more time, we might have seen him taking on entire libraries full of chess players in small town challenges, beating them all handily, even as he narrated ongoing gnat serenades to his opponents. Oh yeah. Not kidding. And yet, I say again, it doesn't matter because all is forgiven when the music starts to play. Whether it's Ahmet Ertegun (a pugnaciously likeable Curtis Armstrong) belting out his song "Mess Around" to give Charles the idea of how it goes, or all the many, many big Ray Charles hits and indelible musical moments, this particular Oscar contender remains resolutely confident, as it should, about the power of its ace card, the music of Ray Charles.

But there is no end of distractions along the way: heroin addiction (including the mandatory screaming sweating convulsing withdrawal scene complete with dizzy-making hallucinatory camera effects), the civil rights era, domestic conflict on multiple fronts, all dragged in to assert at least passing relevance to each and every member of the audience, though more often these elements feel like moldering plastic relics sitting around a thrift store. It's too much. But you know what I say now. All is forgiven when the music starts again—even with more excesses embedded right there. Many of the musical interludes play like crudely conceived music videos designed to make obvious narrative points (you can imagine for yourself: "I Got a Woman," "Hit the Road Jack," etc.).

All forgiven, it is great music, and part of me would prefer to just go wandering off on tangents about that. I was struck, for example, by how much Charles's amazing country phase of the early '60s reminded me of the cunning surprise of Bryan Ferry's first solo album. Both get over chiefly on swagger, dazzle, and instinct, which you can still hear equally in both.

Jamie Foxx is a total pro from start to finish, developing a fully realized persona that basically fits the profiles of Ray Charles I know. Too much of the movie's time is spent on the drugs and womanizing and not enough on things it touches on so tantalizingly briefly, such as Charles's fascinating cross-pollinations of Baptist gospel, rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, and country musics, a regular Gregor Mendel in his own right.

But nothing about that is surprising. Movies are good at things like drugs and womanizing (awards season biopic movies even more so, it sometimes seems). Meticulous art or musical history, not so much. But Ray Charles is such a giant all you have to do is play his music and most of the time that's going to make it. It could be photos of my cats and it would still be good. Ray is probably better than photos of my cats, but not by that much. My cats are pretty cute.