Ray of Light

Rating: 7/10 (15 October 2018)

Jamie Foxx gives a stellar performance as Ray Charles in an amiable, but perhaps a bit lightweight, biopic of at blind virtuoso.
Born to a poor Southern family, Ray overcomes the blindness that besets him at a young age and learns the piano, eventually performing with various combos on his way to joining Atlantic Records, and releasing his first single. Although success comes, eventually turning him to one of the biggest stars in the world, he's continually beset by guilt over the death of his younger brother and turns to heroin to help him deal with it.
"The part he was born to play" is a bit of a cliché, but is perhaps truly appropriate with Jamie Foxx here, he inhabits the role completely and was most deserving of his best Oscar actor for this performance. He's in virtually every scene (as you might imagine) and manages to convincingly play forty years of the main man's life. His is not the only great performance though, both Kerry Washington and Regina King provide excellent foils for Foxx as his long suffering wife Della Bea and "Road wife" Margie Hendricks.
Whilst I understand that it was a passion project for Taylor Hackford, I do feel like there is some criticism for him for some of the decisions. Some of the montage wipes involving news articles and the like feel pretty amateurish and jarred a bit with the quality of the rest of the production. Despite its running time, I felt it was skipping over some aspects that it could have gone further into, particularly the negative aspects or controversies. The criticism that Charles received for "sexing up" gospel music is dismissed after one scene, as his is decision to pull out of gigs in front of segregated audiences and his court cases are dismissed with phone calls. I also felt that it could have done with a bit more after his hospitalisation rather than just an onscreen note that said he was successful and recorded for many more years. . . I understand the argument that there wasn't much drama in those years, but still.
A performance of a lifetime, in a fairly decent film. You should check it out.